Guys, while I was at the 25 (not driving
) I made a point to dig through over 30 used RR's to look for the seam separation issue, and found none!
This feedback is from the Miata website on the RR's:
The RR's were great for us. Pretty sure we triple stinted one set (9+/-) hours and regularly double stinted both the front/rears. During our last stint our car double stinted rears and I was given sticker fronts to go make up some time, ran our fastest lap of the race after 636 laps and still went 20 more. Rears look very good still after the fact, I drove the fronts pretty hard though and we did a pressure change which we wouldn't have done for longevity. Thankful for Toyo's support we managed to Top 5 overall with 225 RR's.
Also this describing the split:
Ok, now on to the tires: We did run the Toyo RR's on both of our cars. We mounted them prior to learning about the date code thing and by the time we figured it out half of the tires were mounted incorrectly and were already on the way down to California to the race.
On one of the test days on the 99 car we did start to see a very slight seam split on 2 of the tires, but it was only on the improperly mounted tires. One of them was on the front and one was on the back. Toyo re-mounted the 2 tires in question properly for us, then we ran them the remainder of the test day for 3 to 4 more hours on both our 1.6L and 1.8L and had zero issues. By the end of the test day you would never had known the 2 tires with the slight tire issue ever had any issue at all. At the end of the test day we then got all the tires mounted per Toyo’s instructions and we never had a single issue all weekend. The tires performed flawlessly and look forward to running them on the car for our NASA races this upcoming year.
If you have never done this event before it truly is a must do..... This was our 5th year and we look forward to it every year. Jerry and the team at NASA put on an outstanding event.
What is interesting is that the split was described as getting better when remounted in the correct orientation,and run some more. As I understand it, the seams are not a straight butt joint, but overlap at an angle, which is why orientation matters. One set of forces tries to peel up the seam, the other squishes it down (in my best technical terms
)
The last interesting tidbit is how fast the RR's were. Most of the Miatas were on Hoosiers, but the Miatacage guys on RR's posted some of the very fastest outright laptimes in E3 - around 2:04 flat on the bypass course.
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