Tire Prep For Racing

We get questions from time to time about what we recommend doing to the tires for racing so we wanted to put out some information about what we recommend.

One thing we found that works really good is to just wipe all the tires with a water wet rag to clean any residue or dirt/dust off the tires.  The tires do provide a good amount of traction so for most tracks this method works great.  If you do wipe the tires with the wet rag, you might have to scrub the tire a bit with the rag to remove all the residue and also make sure the rag is very wet, if the rag starts to dry out it will not clean the tires as good.

Some tracks and racers are using a tire traction compound that is used in other forms of RC like 10th scale racing.  We have not done any testing with various traction compounds so we don't have any recommendations on what brand works the best but you can find some info on various internet sites about this.  Most tracks that do allow the traction compounds to be used have a set brand they allow so consult your local track for more input on this for each track.  We don't really like the traction compounds to be used on the cars but we know it might be necessary at some tracks.  Depending on what traction compound you use, they can be very bad smelling and because they soften the tires in most cases it can lead to a tire war and that is never fun for anybody so we recommend starting with the water wet rag method and see how that works out first.

We also get some questions on why we do not put foam inserts in the Midget tires.  When we developed the midget car we did try foam in the tires but the foam made the cars very bouncy and our tire vendor had lots of issues keeping the tires round during the gluing process with the foam inside the tires.  We also found since the foam was so small and thin, it would move in the tires during racing and actually break and then get wadded up in the tire and throw the tire was out balance so we opted to just leave the foam out of the midget tires.  We do put foam in the sprint car tires since the tires are much larger and this allows the foam to be much thicker and more robust.

Hope we answered some questions on the tires for you and if you have any additional questions please send us an email to support@1rc-racing.com and we will try and answer any questions you might have.

Thanks