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ZDan Overall I agree with you on the argument of erroring on the high side and it all being safe. I dont want to argue or anything, it seems like you want some honest answers to some of the questions you raised after my post, so here they are.
For cold pressure, depending on day or track I go out at 22 to 24psi. I dont drive like I stole it on my first session, Im aware of my tires being underflated, and even if somehow I wasnt, I can feel the tire distorting under braking and turning. I rarely get the pressure I want in one session, it takes 2 or 3 sessions doing small adjustments to get it right. I also dont set equal presures on all corners, more on that in a second.
Lower pressure = more heat. I've heard this a number of times, but I wonder if its actually true, because the pyro says completely the opposite. Higher pressures = more heat, lower pressures end up with less heat on the tire. I imagine it has to do with people thinking the rubber moving more with lower pressures or the bigger contact patch makes it heat up more, but thats not what the pyro says to me.
Im not running 2-3 laps at a time, I run 20 minutes sessions. But at the same time, I run time trials, so only the fastest lap count, the rest I use it as practice if I know I have tires to spare and that Im not destroying them by overheating them. On a street tire, the fastest lap is almost always the first lap out of the pits (first full lap after the outlap). When I say it takes 2-3 laps to get the ideal pressure, what I mean is that 2-3 laps in will be my fastest lap on that tire, meaning usually that pressures were too low and I was having to deal with the tire rolling over, or not heated up enough yet (im in canada, track days can be cold sometimes).
Regarding pressure changes, 1-2 PSI dont change my car into a mustang, but might be enough to gain or drop half a second. Half a second can be the difference between first and sixth place in a time trial, so to me, it is drastic. If you go under the point where the tire starts rolling over, it will handle quite different, taking more time to settle up during turns, and getting easily upset by bumps and curbs (and times suffer much more).
Thats all I got, more or less, if you have more questions, shoot away. I know this all sounds very subjective and non scientific way but the stopwatch doesnt lie, even if a driver isnt Senna, as long as he can drive to his limits every time out, the stopwatch will tell you if the change was good, or bad. Its then up to the driver/team to either record information on what changed and the effect it had, or chuck it all up to external factors and decide it did nothing or little.
Edit: forgot to add, this all works very well for a car that is track ready, at least suspension and alignment wise. Trying to optimise pressures too much when you have too little camber is just going to end up killing the tires. I imagine that somebody looking to extract the absolute maximum of their tires will have taken the time to get an alignment dialed up to maximise tire performance, otherwise, yeah, "36 hot and your good" is as good as anything else.