Last May I bought some new Pilot race prc front and med rear tires. I only got to put maybe an hour on them becuase my bike was being a little bitch all year. They sat in the somewhat hot garage 80F (during the day) until Oct when I put them in my constant 65F dark basement. I'm broke but will buy new one's of course if they would be dangerous. Did I say I'm broke? I'm just a trackday intermediate rider but I guess that's not necessarily a good thing what it comes to worn/old tires.
Freezing hurts them as does being exposed to ambient ozone, which just happens to collect near the floor. Not that they can't be safely used, but they are not going to have the same amount grip.
I guess everybody needs to keep there tires in the house huh? never heard of such a thing .As long as there out of the weather there allrite.Its how many heat cycles they have gone through that matters.
The rules for trying to keep expensive rubber alive and well untill slaughter are; store in a plastic bag as high off the floor as practical and well above freezing as long as they don't get too hot (as in a tin shed in summer). I got handed a season's worth of free dunlop's at one time right before the start of a race season, so it DID come up!
Well i guess i could stick them in the attick ,my garage is not heated ,its seperate from the house. winter sux!
Some tires heat cycle from temperature alone, some need abrasion to heat cycle. Some of the Bstone stuff, (some, not all) is grippier the second session than the first, no matter what you do with the warmers. Why? Because even if you get them to 170 degrees for 40 minutes, (standard ops for going sprint racing on cold tires that need to be heated) they still don't finish curing until after they are ridden on and abraided..... then the chemicals inside release, and they start aging. And..... if they sit for a few months, (even if they did only get one heat cycle) they're still suspect. The michelins however, generally seem to start cooking with temp only, and it's only the harder endurance compounds that don't start "cooking" inside that way without abrasion. But a PRC front starts to "do its thing" once you apply anything over 130 degrees to it from what I've found. Why am I typing all this nonsense and senseless crap? Just to say that freezing is WAY WORSE than letting a tire get a little warm, and if your garage is attached to your house and doesn't go below freezing, you're a-okay. If it freezes where you store the bike, bring the wheels/tires in. You guys have no idea what I went through in 04 and 05 to get this tire company started. Man oh man this is funny but true. Now I have a temperature controlled warehouse to keep my inventory, but in 04 and 05 I had to dedicate two bedrooms of my three bedroom house to nothing but storing tires. That's right, no Christmas sleep overs for Q's family, they couldn't fit with all the tires, because my garage isn't heated...... what a mess..... I thank you guys for getting my business up and strong now so I have a place to store my tires and I got my house back!!!!! YOU BUMS!!!!!! Ride Safe-Quentin
...so the fact that a certain ex-Pirelli dealer (that I used to work for) stores tires in the unheated warehouse all winter is a bad thing?? ;-)
Generally speaking, the how many cycles for Michelins should be answered this way. IF, and only IF we're talking sprint stuff, I would say that the fastest the tire will ever be will be about laps 3-20. Then, the degredation starts. Most mid-experts and novices are finding that if they do two or sessions on a PR3, five to six on a PR5, then they're finding the limits. The medium track/day or endurance stuff is usually good for a full ten cycles under most mortal riders, but of course, the grip isn't there for sprint racing. Pirelli, Dunlop, and Bstone are all similiar. There are slower guys on the P tires saying "I can get two hole days" or whatever, but Mark Junge, and Tray Batey, and in the old Larry Denning P tire days, these guys were putting brand new stuff on every single session. Why? The cost of crashing and/or not winning exceeded what it cost them for tires. What should the rest of us do? Well that depends on individual needs, budget, performance, bikes, riders, tracks..... yada yada yada on and on and on. That's where you need to find a tire guy in the region you race at that you trust, and stick with him. The answer to the "how many cycles" question depends on more factors that we think. If you run at tracks I service then by all means do drop me a line and I'll do my very best to get you more information, and to help you put a program together than balances performance, budget, and personal riding goals. Thanks -Quentin
If you are doing track days, it doesn't matter much whether tires are at 100%. On any given day, tires will have a different level of grip. I would say that the tires are not at all inherently unsafe just because they have more or less grip than they possibly could. Regardless of how good or poor the grip is, you have to ride to what you've got during each session. On a cold damp morning, you are going to have a ton less grip than a nice warm afternoon. The difference you will see between those two conditions is way bigger than you will ever see due to heat cycles, or age of tire within reason, or the way a tire was stored. Those tire related factors affect the last 10% of grip, but conditions of the day effect a much larger percentage of the available grip. So, for safety, especially at a track day, it is not how your tires have been stored, but rather how you adapt to the current track conditions that is what you need to be concerned with. To sum it up, having absolutely ideal tires is a nice advantage, while riding to the conditions of the moment is a necessity. Not having perfect tires won't put you on your ass. But failing to ride according to whatever level of traction you are getting for the session will.
In response to the original question, just be sure to take it easy on them the first session. ******* Freezing? How does this hurt the tires? Chemical reaction tends to slow down with colder temps. Just curious. How high of a temperature does it take to heat cycle a tire? (pilot power) If it gets up to 110deg in my garage during the summer, will that heat cycle the tires?
I know that all the tire guys try to act like chemical engineers and mechanical engineers and say they know all about the product and the makeup and compounds and this and that....... honest truth is that the tire companies won't share this information with us. The scientists that do understand all of this aren't allowed to talk to us, so despite what any other tire guy may tell you, the real honest to goodness truth, is that we don't know. The people that import the product into the U.S. don't even know. You'd have to fly to France or Japan or Germany and get a highly paid professional engineer to break his non-disclosure contract in order to actually know the answers to these questions..... Now, that being said, we do have a phenomenal understanding of how the different compounds relate to things like asphalt, temperature, wear, grip, etc etc etc so knowing what to put on the customers bike in any given situation is the important part. But knowing how the cords are exactly wound and/or exactly how they "make" the rubber compounds, we don't know. We couldn't say chemically why freezing makes them crack, or shear, or what have you. I just know that it does. By cracking and shearing I mean to say that if a rain tire or a really soft slick gets super cold for any length of time, it'll actually crack and have spiderwebs all over it after use. And yes, the spiderwebbing destroys any chance of good performance. As for the dot's, and harder slicks, they don't crack, but they start to shear unevenly. Did you ever try to peel a sticker off of your bike, and the top layer came off but the bottom stayed on? Then to get the adhesive off you kept rubbing, and rubbing, and the little balls of adhesive take form in long strips and will eventually peel and roll off of the bike? This is what a tire will do after it has frozen, and usually the shear rate is so bad that you start riding on marbles, so to speak, and grip is reduced. Now..... this doesn't mean that if you are transporting your bike to Talladega for the opening race and you have brand new tires on, and the temp dips to 29 degrees for a few hours overnight, that you should throw your tires away. I'd run them for sure. Buuuutttt...... at the same time, we do avoid shipping large loads of tires in the coldest parts of the winter because if the tires are exposed to say........ 25 degrees for 72 hours straight, and in the middle of those nights the temp dips down in the low teens for a bit......... well, I wouldn't run that tire for anything more than a sighting practice. This is not the gospel, but it's just .02 cents from the tire guy. I'm sure every racer and/or tire guy in the country will recant stories of races won on frozen tires, or races won on tires that melted when their Dad's propane torch melted a hole in them, or (and don't laugh, I actually heard this one once, maybe it's true I don't know) but I heard it told that a guy pulled a tire off of the tire wall at Nelson's and put it on his bike and won a race......... who knows....... Thanks- Ride Safely, -Quentin
