Tire Temps

[Carter Pease]

I was running a race last weekend and my rear tire temps were higher than my front tire temps. Then I was told that if your tire temps are that way you have understeer, and that your front temps need to be higher than your rear temps. Is this an accurate statement?

[TJ Koyen]

If your rear tires are hotter they are working harder than the fronts, most likely sliding. Meaning you have OVERsteer.

For what it’s worth, though tire temps can be a useful tool, a lot of guys never even bother checking them.

Driver/Coach/Wrench : Innovative Performance/Exprit
Owner : Oktane Visual - www.oktanevisual.com
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[Chris Livengood]

You should be combining data. The driver needs to say conclusively what the kart is behaving like, then you need to correlate that experience to the tire temp data. You then make a change, test again,  record new data, and evaluate how that change affected the data.

For example, it cannot be conclusively said that the kart was oversteering or understeering simply by saying the rears were higher than the fronts. If your front tires never reached optimum temperature you could experience an understeer as the tire would not properly adher to the surface. Conversely, your situation could be as TJ described. The front tires reached optimum temperature but the rears were overworked as a result of an oversteer and actually went beyond optimum temperature.

[Peter Zambos]

Temps aside, how was the kart actually rotating?  Were you understeering?  Not to sound like a smart ass, but hough tire temps are nice to have, you typically only have to drive the kart to find the answer to that question.

[Jean-Paul]

I have been driving for about a year and I am now just starting to tune my chassis. I just started last week taking tire temp readings. I seem to read a lot about how people “do a lot of this” and how people “don’t do a lot of that”. I decided that my understanding did not develop (the theory part – the why).  I will really spend next year reading, gathering data, trying “this and that”, one at a time and comparing. I know some of my efforts will not reap rewards – but I will learn what is important and what is not. And I will have learned it first hand. I hope that my tire temps will correlate and help build my understanding of why the kart handles for a particular situation. Plus – if karters are like most off the other people in my life … some may not really not know what they are talking about. And right now, I don’t have a way to distinguish between the two.

To complicate matters … I have read certain things in books, read about the same thing on-line. I then ask some reputable people that are quite knowledgable and they say quite the opposite to what I read.

It is the opposing views which made me decide to quit asking people and start learning “the hard way”. My motto from now on is “read, try, read, try, and then evaluate.

[TJ Koyen]

Jean-Paul,

Read, try, read, try… is the best method for kart tuning.

The difficult part of kart tuning is that one adjustment can cause two completely different handling characteristics depending on track conditions, class, chassis, driving style and all the other outside influences.

The best thing you can do is test and learn exactly what certain handling imbalances feel like and what it feels like when adjustments are made. It seems obvious, but you need to know what the kart is REALLY doing to be able to adjust it. People say “it’s loose” or “it’s tight” but it needs to be broken down further. Is it “tight” because the inside rear isn’t lifting? Or is it “tight” because the inside rear is lifting too much and slamming back down right away? Opposite issues that can feel the same if you don’t know the difference. You might end up going in the complete opposite direction you need to to fix the problem. This is why breaking the corner down into entry, apex, and exit is so helpful. It helps you figure out what the kart is doing in chronological order of when it happens in the corner. If you go into a corner and feel the kart sliding out at apex, you’d say the kart is oversteering. Well if we look at the entry of the corner, maybe your kart feels twitchy. Now we can diagnose that the twitchiness is causing the sliding and we know that we obviously need to narrow the front a bit to get some front grip out.

Karting adjustments are always conditional. Meaning there isn’t a standard or set effect you’ll get from an adjustment every time.

Driver/Coach/Wrench : Innovative Performance/Exprit
Owner : Oktane Visual - www.oktanevisual.com
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[Martin Colligan]

I run Mojo’s … any suggestion on tire temp ? Is there a temp I should REALLY not achieve ?

Thanks for your help !

[Troy V Smith]

This is interesting, as we actually took an entire day on Friday and focused our attention to one kart/driver and testing the way the tires worked in various conditions.  Up until this point we were kind of “winging it” by feel.  The day we spent sweating it out, repeating an 8 lap run over and over, taking temp and pressure readings after every run was incredibly worth while.  I/We learned more than we could have ever hoped for.  We learned now what “optimum” temperature to shoot for, what pressure to start at, how high the pressures would increase, what tire characteristics are created with a loose kart, vs, tight.  I feel very confident, without any driver input and using just a temp probe and pressure gauge, I can tell you how the kart is handling for that driver!  I have no exaggeration when I say, we lost over two seconds a lap that day by utilizing the information we gained.  If you don’t have the time, make the time – do some testing of your own – well worth the efforts!

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