Drift day front tyre usage

cascade88

cascade88

Member
Gonna have my first drift day next month and have got 4x skid wheels for the rear with rubber on and will get more tyres to take also.

Just unsure what to expect from front tyre usage for the day?
I know it'll be down to conditions too, wet will use less tyre, understeering newbie eating them up more etc etc
but in roughly what should I be looking at for a noob?
 
Front tyre wear goes in 3 stages for drifting-

Learning- More as you'll understeer.
Not bad- Hardly any as you'll not understeer.
Badass- More as you'll be locking fronts, 4 wheel drifting, etc.

Either way, you'll never totally wreck a set of fronts even in a few drift days, so you'll be fine.
 
Chewed up my front tyres on the first drift day I had through understeer. After that no problems with front tyre wear.
 
Stavros said:
Front tyre wear goes in 3 stages for drifting-

Learning- More as you'll understeer.
Not bad- Hardly any as you'll not understeer.
Badass- More as you'll be locking fronts, 4 wheel drifting, etc.

Either way, you'll never totally wreck a set of fronts even in a few drift days, so you'll be fine.
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Thanks man.

prblmslvrs said:
Chewed up my front tyres on the first drift day I had through understeer. After that no problems with front tyre wear.
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Yeah didn't wanna hear that so much. Just read through your build actually, pretty sweet work.
 
still over a year on a set of toyo t1s probably about 10-15 skid days, plenty of lockups etc etc. wearing now though more so due to camber etc, quick flip of the tyre and prob get another 6 or 7 days
 
Mine would generally last two drift days from brand new to canvas due to left foot braking as I never hada working handbrake. Otherwise you should be fine.
 
Gooly, are you a twinning god or is it that you can't drift without dragging your front brakes the whole time? :)
 
No, he's just drifting properly!

I've never seen Gooly drifting, but if you can wreck your fronts that quickly without understeer it's good shit.
 
My local track was Lydden, the only way to do a big / fast / early entry into the elbow without a hydro or hubs was to chuck it in hard with a shift lock and then lock up the fronts just before the apex else you'd end up in the gravel. My 325 only had coilovers and rack spacers so had to work with what I had haha. Same deal with doing the hairpin at pod after pulling third on the big corner.

I should add as well, I've been lucky enough to have never done a drift day in the cold or the wet; 2015 was largely a good year for weather on drift days haha. The front tyres were landsail LS288s, a budget tyre that has a nice soft compound; you could dig your nail into the compound quite easily. I'd imagine that plus the reasonably shit surface at Lydden would have contributed, I never managed to make a set of rears last a round at Lydden either and it was only a standard power 325 with a standard ratio diff so my tyre wear was partly down to conditions as well. Regardless though, repeated lockups on entrys will very quickly take its toll on your fronts.
 
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Gooly said:
My local track was Lydden, the only way to do a big / fast / early entry into the elbow without a hydro or hubs was to chuck it in hard with a shift lock and then lock up the fronts just before the apex else you'd end up in the gravel. My 325 only had coilovers and rack spacers so had to work with what I had haha. Same deal with doing the hairpin at pod after pulling third on the big corner.
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By far the best way, most fun to do, and deffo most fun to watch. Reading this restores my faith in UK drifting slightly.

The amount of people you see claiming you literally can't do that corner (or the pod hairpin in fact!) without wanding it makes me upset for baby drift jesus.
 
My hydro wouldn't work at lydden so that's exactly how I drifted there, the only thing you can't do is a long early entry.
I've never been to pod with a working handbrake so big corner into hair pin was always a scrabble between 3rd, footbrake and gear changing
 
Gooly, I can see how that technique would take its toll. I was thinking you were doing a hell of a lot of twinning and left foot braking the whole time for hours on end! lol :p
 
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