HPDE on PS4
 

Hi, I'm thinking about participating in my first HPDE with my 2022 BRZ Limited. The event is 7x20 minute sessions with 1 hour open lapping at the end. I have the stock Michelin PS4s on the car, and from what I understand the PS4 is a performance oriented tire but not a track tire.

I plan on pushing the car (participated in a few non-HPDE driving events before) but I'm not worried about lap times - more about destroying a $1000 set of street tires on one day at the track. I'm not ready to drop a few k on a set of track wheels and tires given this is my first event and I might not like it (unlikely :) ), but putting 7-8 heat cycles and 2+ hours of very hard driving on them seems like it could be a bad idea for their longevity.

TLDR - will 1-2 track days do in the PS4s? If I plan to make it a more regular thing I'll spring for a dedicated track set, but I want to just try it for now if possible without so much initial cost.

My PS4s are fine after 1 track day on the stock setup stock pads / upgraded fluid with plenty of tire squeal to prove I was consistently using them :P

I am doing another track day on CSG Spec CP pads this weekend so cna report back in.

My STI’s PS4S were fine for 2 track days as well.

Plenty of tread on both sets


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Try to get some front camber (camber bolts and/or offset top mounts), that will help them a bit. Might also rotate front/back halfway through the event.

PS4 should be up to it though.

Don’t drift every corner at 10/10ths and you’ll be fine. Check ‘em after every session to keep an eye on the wear. Doing a few laps at 10/10ths should be totally fine, but pounding on them all day long like that might kill them.

https://media0.giphy.com/media/5t9wJ...cPNk/giphy.gif

That's why my first set of tires for this car were Z2 Star Specs lol.

Mind your pressures, check your tires after each session and rotate as needed especially if a certain corner is taking the brunt. having a square setup is nice for rotation. I was worried about the Primacy tires lasting so I ordered some sport cup 2s but if I had the PS4s I would’ve just used those although I would’ve considered them expendable.

Have fun and let us know how it goes!

My experience with tracking PS4 is that after a few heat cycles those tires will start to loose grip despite still having a lot of thread left. As mentioned before adding front camber is recommended. I guess that after 1-2 mild track days they should still feel ok. The last set lasted a long time but grip reduction after first few track days was very noticeable to me both in track and street conditions.

Agree 100%. They start pretty good, but after a couple track days they felt greasy to me... That said, I don't take my times all that seriously and actually enjoy sliding a bit, so I got 8 track days out of them. They were really toasted at the end though and I was down about 2-3 seconds from my nominal 1:33 lap time.

Be sure to check your pressures after each session...

Tracking any car hard eats tires, and I really don't like the tread squirm feel and chunking I have got on brand new street tires in the past. I decided to just go ahead and put track oriented tires on mine and save the PS4 for the off season or when I sell/trade it. Figured I was buying a set of tires either way, so rather have good tires on it for the track.

I did add camber bolts for a few bucks and moved the lower bolts to the upper hole to get some decent neg camber.
Newer drivers (even faster ones) are much, much easier on tires. Old (experienced?) guys like me with 20 years track experience are sometimes able to manage tires really well, but I just don't find much fun in that so I am kinda hard on tires and brakes.

Thanks everyone for the responses. I can't thank replies yet due to account age I believe but I appreciate your input.

Do you daily the car, use it as a track toy, or somewhere in between? I don't drive much because I live in a city and don't commute, but I would still like a tire that's tolerable for short-medium drives. Ideally if I end up taking track days more seriously, I would get a tire that's built with track use in mind but not as the only purpose. On that note, specifically what tires did you buy and how are they to live with?

You'll be totally fine for a first event.

Some front camber is nice to have, and if you like cornering, you should get some camber bolts, as it'll get you more front grip AND preserve the outer shoulders.

be mindful of your brake pedal if you go stock.

Take lots of water, and hire yourself an instructor.

https://www.counterspacegarage.com/w...r-bolt-frs-brz

There is quite a bit of subjectivity on what is acceptable for a dual use tire...

In general, the first thing you give up on a more track oriented tire (other than longevity) is performance in wet/cold conditions... not much of a problem for me in Southern California, perhaps a big problem in New England.

Around here I see people using RS4s and SX2s for dual purpose track/daily. I just switched my PS4s for SX2s and I daily the car (but it does not get driven far/often). Lots of choices; all are compromises... I chose the SX2s for price/availability (RS4s are on backorder until April). Never used them before; next track day is in 2 weeks!

I went with Falken Azenis rt660. I do live in mild South Carolina climate and have other vehicles to drive it is really cold or raining. Basically a nice weather commute and track day car for me. I am in a rural area and this type of 200 TW tire is really quite fine for street driving if you are mindful of really cold and/or really wet conditions and take it easy if you find yourself in those conditions. For those who need the car to be a "normal" street car I'd suggest two sets of wheels and tires or just go with something more street capable like a PS4S Michelin (much grippier than the PS4 but also still very good on the street).

toasted as in no grip or did you wear 'em down to the cords?

The more AutoX/TT focused 200tw track-oriented tires with most of their tread depth remaining will have comparable wet grip vs. the best "Max Perf" tires. A052s in particular are phenomenal in the wet! They also don't need to be warmed up much, pretty much good to go down to decently cool ambient temps.
Tire Rack tests of the best Max Perf and Extreme Perf tires:
https://www.tirerack.com/tires/tests...y.jsp?ttid=273
https://www.tirerack.com/tires/tests...y.jsp?ttid=269


What the "Extreme Perf" 200tw tires do give up is some hydroplaning resistance. Especially past half tread depth...

Z3's were also good in the wet as long as they weren't worn too far.

Why not both!:thumbsup: Took them down to the wear bars, then took them out for a drift session... past the cords to the point of destruction. Don't think I'll ever do that again, had to deal with cutting the cords off the axles and realized you can really damage your brake lines.:burnrubber:

I do already have a winter set and a place to store the summers so cold temps are not much of an issue. Obviously you get less rain than I do, but given that I don’t really rely on the car, I can probably just opt not to drive if the weather is a problem - though that would not be ideal...

I know it’s a very subjective thing - I think I’ve never even been in a car with “track tires” though so I just wanted anecdotes :) I’ve heard a lot of people are on SX2s so I’ll keep that in mind for the future.

well that sucks! the SC3s had great grip until just before the cords .. then they'd start to fall apart and i had a chunk come off and whip around pulling some paint off my front fender... oops. then i stabbed myself on one of the steel belts or whatever inside the tire... at least it wasn't a brake line! my camaro tires were staggered 275/305 so i'm excited about being able to rotate around and getting more life!

Between the Hankook RS4 and SX2, which one is quieter on the street?

I am planning to autocross my Premacies this season. I am pretty new to autocross, last summer was my first season. I drove Infiniti M37 on GoodYear Eagle Sport all seasons, very heavy car with a lot of body roll. It was fun but seeing the wear on the outer edges of front tires scared me :)

Got the '22 BRZ base model couple of month ago, my first performance and rwd car.

From reading this thread I am thinking I should get the crash bolts installed after couple of runs. Also what would you recommend for tire pressures. I am up in Canada so in spring/summer the temperatures will probably be from 70-90F. Do i put more air in the front to keep the outer edges from shredding. And what about the rear?

Yes camber bolts are good, no downsides.

Personally set the pressures to what the door card says, modern tires aren't the marshmallow balloons of old, the primacies are summer tires. Mine says 35/35psi cold.

I do have to use ones from Subaru to stay in the stock class, correct?

Correct

I think the weight of the car, suspension balance, and drivetrain have a lot to do with how you set the tire pressures.

On my GTI, since it was FWD and understeared, I had to add about 5 PSI to keep the tires off the sidewalls. On my BMW 435 which is a very heavy car that tended to understeer on it's staggered set up I had to add 15 PSI to keep the summer tires off the sidewalls (still under max PSI for the tire, surprisingly). Even when I moved to 200TW tires on a square set up I was adding around 10PSI. I constantly chalked my tires and kept a log to dial things in and make sure I was adding too much.

For a lightweight RWD car like my 22 BRZ I'm looking forward to not having to play around with the air pressures so much.

EDIT: This is for autocross, not a track day.

Disclaimer: There are a LOT of people more serious about their track days than I am... and as always opinions differ.

When I was starting out, the two biggest improvements I made were:

1) Hiring an all day instructor

2) Controlling tire pressure.

I started out a naysayer, mocking the people that were constantly adjusting their tire pressure like the cars and coffee meme of the tool in the Mustang blaming his crash on not using a digital tire pressure gauge and his crash being due to tires underinflated by 1.5 lbs...

But then I had an "aha" moment, wondering why I was slower and sliding more as the day went on... only to find that due to heat my tires were massively (like 8 lbs over the door sticker!!!) overinflated. Correcting the pressure and going back out opened my eyes... I had been an idiot.

The next step was to guess at what pressure I should be running, and check as soon as I came off the track. Look for scrubbing on the sidewall and it will help with underinflation, but by the time you see the centers wearing due to overinflation it is too late.

So, how do you tell what tire pressure is best for your car, your driving, track conditions, and tire differences? The answer is a tire pyrometer, a fancy name for a digital thermometer that can measure the tire temperature at the outter, middle, and inner portions of the tread. Ideally you want them to be as even as possible. If the center is hotter, you have too much air. If the outsides are hotter you have too little.

The inflation guides in the manual and door jam are for maximum efficiency, not performance guides.

Bonus hint: If you look for a tire pyrometer, you will find they cost between $150 and $500. Ouch! But what is a pyrometer? It is a thermocouple, and the electronics are measuring the resistance across dissimilar metals.

You can buy a tire thermocouple probe on Amazon for $33. Search for "K-type tire pyrometer". (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...1?ie=UTF8&th=1) Great, now you have a cheap probe that you can stick into your tire tread... how do you read the temperature??? Many, many digital multimeters can accept K-type thermocouples as inputs. A Klein MM400 (goes on sale for $30) can do this, and also is useful for checking circuits, voltages, etc. One of the better $63 investments in my lap times. If you already have a digital multimeter, check to see if it has a temperature setting. If so, you can probably buy a $5 adapter to accept a k-type probe.:thumbsup:

Edit: Additional info - on Amazon you can get a thermocouple digital thermometer that accepts k-type probes for even less than a multi-meter, however for an additional $5-$10 a digital multimeter is a much more useful tool.

I find chalking my tires helps with seeing how close I'm getting to the sidewalls.


Wouldn't something like this work for checking the temp of your tires? Just shoot a beam at multiple points across the contact patch to read how hot they are getting. You can find quite a few which are affordable.
https://www.amazon.com/KIZEN-Infrare...xpY2s9dHJ1ZQ==

I too started with chalk...

As far as the infrared thermometers go, the only problem is that they measure surface temperature, and the surface cools quickly when you come off the track. The tire pyrometer probes are designed to be stuck into the tread itself (the probe linked is set to 5mm depth) to read internal temp, which does not cool as quickly. Never tested with the infrared (even though I have one!). My base assumption was that if all the tire pyrometer kits used the insertion probes, there is probably some benefit. Then again, I may be a bit of a tool junkie looking for an excuse to buy another tool...

This ^

My inside always shows hotter with an IR gun since the outside cools faster due to the amount of camber I run.

Yes Infiniti was understeering too, riding the sidewalls a lot

I guess I will have to wait until autocross season starts to see what will happen with premacies and if additional PSI's are needed on the fronts

I saw the thread title and thought it meant there was an HPDE game on the PlayStation4, whoops! :bonk:

PS4 tires are fine for an HPDE, especially for someone's very first HPDE. Stock brake pads are usually fine for beginners as well (personally I wouldn't do it, so don't interpret it as an endorsement). Most first timers aren't very hard on their cars. And PS4 tires are very competent. I typically would get 20,000 street miles and 3-4 weekend events out of a set of PSS on my Cayman (PSS was precursor to PS4).

So what if tires loose grip from heat cycling? Unless you're competing in an event, or have unlimited funds, that's just the name of the game and is unavoidable. These events are about having fun and learning car control. Super sticky tires will make it harder to learn car control IMO. As long as the tires aren't chunking and/or failing everything should be good :party0030:

Check your tire pressure after every session. As long as there's no wear on your sidewalls keep lowering the pressure if you think you can gain traction. A paint pen is also good to use for marking your sidewalls.

As a final HPDE comment, I can't speak highly enough about the durability of Hankook RS4 tires. They take a beating and keep going. Cheap and long lasting. They don't look like they've been dealing with the 4000 lb weight of my C63.

Troof! Mine follow...

A setup optimized for quickest lap times will almost always have the insides of the treads hotter than the center and outside.

It will vary based on the car, tire used, setup, and the venue but generally speaking with a semi-optimized setup (i.e., some decent negative camber), you're putting heat into the inside tread down every straightaway *and* around every turn (including the inside tires). While the outside portion of the tread gets a break on the straights (and outside portion of inside tires gets a break every turn).

Most of us are gonna be better off just aiming for a "known good" hot pressure near the middle of accepted range and just stick with that. Modern 200tw tires have a *very* broad pressure range over which lap times aren't very sensitive to pressure.

I bought a pyrometer years ago and basically it told me what I already knew, I needed more front camber... Unless you are able to do dedicated test days to home in on optimal setup *and* optimal pressures for each setup, IMO pyrometer isn't really going to help a lot, will just be a possibly misleading distraction.

IMO, chalking for modern radials, not so useful... If you don't have significant front camber, you're going to be rolling onto the sidewall to some degree. I don't think pumping up the front tires until you don't see any rollover is a good method. If I had low front camber, I *might* go as high as 38psi hot for the fronts but I wouldn't bother going any higher than that.

I really disagree with the approach of lowering pressure as much as you *think* you can. Hear it all the time at the track, it's like a "how low can you go" competition. People seem to think "less pressure = more grip", but this isn't exactly true. Again, modern trackworthy radials are going to have a very broad pressure range over which they'll give near-optimal performance.

I'm attaching data from a Grassroots Motorsports test of skidpad grip vs. pressure for RT615K+, RT660 , and RE71R tires. https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/ar...oss-and-track/
They did three laps each run, I'm showing the average at each pressure setting. As you can see there is a lot of scatter. Note this data is strictly for continuous lateral grip in one direction for just a few seconds and doesn't account for the negative effects lower pressure might have for track lap times (higher rolling resistance, slower response in transitions, greater heat buildup over time).

Personally, at the track I just aim for 34-36psi hot and don't worry about trying to "optimize" as I know I don't have enough dedicated uninterrupted laps under identical conditions to actually determine optimal with any kind of reasonable accuracy.

Better to err a bit on the high side than on the low side IMO. And not to get caught up in misguided "how low can I go?" experiments...

There are plenty of IR camera footage of Formula 1 cars. They show about the same tire temps as you described. This one of Vettel is particularly illustrative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNYUkRKslEw

I can't really disagree with ZDan, I was certainly generalizing a bit. And I have experienced performance going down from lowering the pressure too much (while still not having sidewall scrub).