Tire maintenance

I get asked the question all the time how should I take care of my tires what is the proper way to clean them what should I do with them during the week what do I do with them at the track well here’s a brief rundown of how we take care of our tires day by day.

Sunday after a race day we take all the tires we ran out of the trailer we refinish each set that was on the racetrack whether it was on the track once twice or three times we still give each tire some attention on the refinishing machine. And all of these tires have been previously cleaned which we will get to in the Sunday portion of this message

Once we refinished the tires we would typically coat them with a heavy coat of whatever we spray on our tires to refinish them we actually use an alcohol-based mix that we mix ourselves. And then we let them sit outside for the rest of the day to just air out and get some sunlight after they have sat outside for the day we bring them back in check the air in them after they have been out in the sun we like to keep our right side is between seven and 9 pounds of air and we keep our left rears between 2 to 4 pounds in our left fronts around 8 to 10 pounds.

A lot of times on Monday we will not do a whole lot with the tires if we have ran the previous week and have used a lot of aggressive prep we may spray another coat of our refinishing mix on them and bring them out for a little more sun therapy!!!

On Tuesday we will start to make a game plan for where we are going racing the following Saturday and we will start looking and making our choices of tires that we want to get sized and ready for that weekend.. we have a spare tire rack that we will put a select few sets that we know we’re going to run the weekend come in and take them in to the tire shed so we can start sizing and organizing a game plan.

Wednesdays we normally do not do much on the tires!

Thursday we will size all of the tires and even start to lay them out in a specific order of how we’re going to possibly run them come Saturday and if it’s a track we know we’re going to have to be aggressive on prep we may start pre-wiping on Thursday

Friday we re-check all the sizes for tires that we had to either grow and or shrink to make sure they are staying where we want them. And at this point we will also wipe any base coats on the tires that we want leading up to the weekend depending on where we are going

Once we have them all size to where we want them we will organize them and or number them as we put them in the trailer to what our game plan is for Saturday we try to do all of this organization so when we get to the track all we have to do is pull them off the rack do one last quick check for stagger and they’re ready to bolt on the cart now also you can’t forget when setting your game plan up do you also have to have other options outside of your direct plan a that you may resort to based on track !!

Saturday at the track we set all of our tires up on our tables in a specific order with specific notes for each set and we try to set them up in order to match our game plan for the day.

Once the tires are on the race track and we come off we take the tires and wheels off the cart we wash them in a bucket of warm water with some sort of cleaning agent in them we have our own that we use there’s a lot of products out there people use I try to stay away from heavy the greasers and solvents you something a little more tire friendly! once we wash the tires we dry ours with a dry clean bath towel and also at this point take the opportunity to clean the wheels themselves while you have them in a bucket of water don’t just clean the tires Inspect the tires for where to see how much they are gripping the race track you can tell a lot by looking at a set of tires after you have ran them to how the cart is performing on track and or if you’re heading in the right direction on tires with your game plan

If this is a set of tires you plan on re-running in the day make sure to get them very clean get them back on your table in the perspective spot they belong with the correct notes on them in case you need to revert back to them throughout the course of the night

And then at the end of your day make sure you note what tires you ran how many laps and what preps you have in those tires and then take everything home and start your Sunday process as stated above