Some might have wondered, why there isn't any racing going on these days. Well, besides being traveling as usual, I was also working on finding a new tire compound for our cars.
It had all started before Christmas, when I visited a slot car club in Berlin - they are racing on commercially available urethane tires and like it a lot. That made me think, because there's 2 things I don't like about the silicone tires we run. Silicone is very hard to true and takes a long time, and secondly, the residue left behind on the track, which results in a lot of cleaning (no, I'm not looking at you, Scott).
So, with the help of Bruce we bought tires that are commercially available in the US for the 1/24 cars - both tires are made by Paul Gage. I also brought back one of the German tires. I established a time table for these tires by mounting them on separate axles and installing the axles in always the same car - ran each tire 100 laps, recorded each lap time, average, etc. This gave me a pretty good idea. The German tire outperformed both of the Paul Gage tires - not by much, but if your tire runs consistent 1/10 of a second better, then I'd say you have the better tire.
After ordering many different urethane compounds, making tires with each, mixing compounds and making more tires, and of course testing all these tires and comparing the data, we finally settled on one particular compound. It also beats the Paul Gage tires and performs equally well as the German tire.
The big disadvantage of the urethane is that the making of tires takes a lot longer. The silicone allows to be cured at elevated, moderate temperature, in order to speed up the curing process - de-mold time is only 1 hour. The urethane takes 16 hours to cure - of course heat can be added, which also results in faster cure/de-mold time, but, and do not underestimate this, if one does accelerate the curing process, the tire will not perform (yes, it was very frustrating to learn). The heat will cause a change in properties of the urethane, which will impact the performance for our use negatively.
One can imagine, that Bruce wasn't looking forward of making tires at all! So, we had to work on a solution for this as well - providing more molds to Bruce.
Only a few challenges to overcome: make it fast, cheap and good quality! And I think we did!
Bruce now has the first batch of molds and is testing this week the tire production with the new urethane compound. We are both excited and looking forward to race with urethane tires in the future, which will be almost the same as on silicone tires.
The urethane seems to be 5/10 of a second slower per lap on the Überring, compared to silicone, but they seem to be almost more fun to drive.
Of course, tire demand will be high, since everybody wants to change their cars over to urethane, so I suggest for everybody to respond to this post with 2 sets of tires he wants to have initially. That way everybody has 2 cars to start out on and can then replace all other cars later on. Also, Bruce will have an idea on which tires to make first.
Looking forward to see you all, soon!
Cheers!
Seb
