Hello, I wanted to know what the difference is between gray and black carpet? Does one have an advantage over another? Is gray more traction or is black?

Gray is the Old School carpet...Black is the new and has much more bite than the gray.

Bingo, the evolution of CRC Fasttrak carpet was first grey (also called "Ozite") then black. Here is a good article talking about both and the switchover. Short story, their source for the ozite carpet ran dry so they had to develop a replacement. The newer black also benefits from higher traction, which comes at costs as well.

https://www.rccaraction.com/xrays-ellis-chats-new-crc-fasttrak-ii-ft2-black-carpet/

With that said, most tracks I've seen in the US can't afford CRC carpet so they go with industrial indoor/outdoor carpet found at Home Depot/Lowe's or astroturf.

Heard a rumor that the Gray might be making a comeback?

I have not raced on on black carpet yet, but found the traction to be almost identical between older Grey Ozite and recycled turf from an indoor athletic arena that the local club in my area currently uses. I did not have to make any setup changes when traveling between tracks, however last year I raced at a track which had used recycled carpet squares from a commercial office space and that offered so much grip that I had to change my setup to prevent traction roll issues with the extra grip. When running Schumacher Cactus Yellow on turf, we see about 12-15 runs before the tires are gone, in contrast the locals running on the carpet squares were saying they see 40+ runs before they need to replace their tires.

There is a "grey" I believe onroad guys are using, not sure if it same though. reading up on what they go through with there black carpet and tire sidewall gluing to get consistency, it sounds like this new "grey' is working out better.


Locally we use the Foss brand Ozite EcoFi Status. It goes up for sale often and is cheap when it does, like 24 cents a square foot. We are finding that for our purposes it allows the tires to actually bite into the carpet versus riding on top of the carpet. Traction feels more consistent versus having traction till the tips of the tire spikes wear off.

40 runs? Wow...
We race on EOS carpet with Schumacher Cactus tires and we replace the tires every 2-3 heats. 3 sets of tires for 1 day of racing unless there is a tire limit. Then you can use 2 sets of tires.

Is use my tires for about 5 more runs and then I cut them to save the foam and acetone the rims. Even practicing with these tires is almost useless, since the car starts driving very different after 3 runs so it useless to try setup changes on these tires that work on a raceday. I hope they will come with a tire that will last a bit longer and is more consistent as it wears.

There is no way I would be a part of that. You are talking $120 a race day just for tires for 1 class, and they are useless for tuning after that. Make that weekly racing and my entire hobby budget isn't that high. I think having to replace my TC tires after 15 runs is too much, but you have it way worse.

Anyway, the indoor carpet track here lets offroad run with slicks. It is black carpet and the tires last all winter. Indoor clay here is high traction and I am running slicks. I am told they will last me all year, if that were not the case, I would not run the buggy. I remember outdoor on a dusty clay track I would buy a new set of tires for our monthly race, but use them all month for practice.

The new grey carpet is Track GT and it is not the same as the old CRC ozite. It has better traction and doesn't require the onroad cars to have glued front tires. It sounds very promising for onroad guys, but only time will tell. A lot of tracks have investments in black carpet in the states.

No way I would tolerate replacing tires after every 3 or 4 packs either. We run on a grey felt-like carpet (I've heard it called Ozite, but I'm not entirely sure this is correct) with a slicks-only rule. A set of tires is competitive for around 3 race meets in my experience, (2 rounds of qualies and 1 main per class, plus one or two packs of practice). After that there's some fall-off but it's gradual enough that tyres can still be used for practice or racing if you're feeling cheap.

It does mean all the hassles of saucing, but sounds like we come out ahead in the end.

Sadly this is what we are facing in the UK/Europe at the moment. Tyres which are at their optimum grip level for 1 run, maybe 2 at best, run 3 they are good enough for practice or maybe a club qualifying round, 4th run pretty useless. Take the UK national scene for example, 2 days of racing outdoors on astro turf, 70% of drivers will be using a set of rear tyres every single run, with the majority of the quick guys changing fronts too. With the qualifying times so close, the extra few 1/10ths that new tyres give you make all the difference, and it's one definite advantage you can give yourself every round. One guy does it, so everyone else follows.

Some of us have been cycling our tires on turf so that the first 3 runs are done only in the mains (spread out over 3 race days), then they are cycled to qualifier tires for the remaining 9+ runs to get roughly 3 full race days on a set of tires that are actually being alternated between an old set (quals) to a new set (mains) if that makes any sense.

How much of the difference in tyre wear do we think is due to UK (I'm assuming from videos) tracks being larger, vs here in North America where many of us are running stock turn motors on much smaller tracks, therefore at lower speeds?

The rubber for 4 tires costs 19euro over here. I reuse the foams and rims. So that’s about 40-60euro for a race day.
i wish we had clay tracks to run slicks on.

This isn’t possible when the tires are marked and you’re limited to 2 or 3 sets per race.
And for carpet racing, tires (Schumacher Cactus) are getting slow after 2-3 runs. If you want to race the big guys in the A main, you need the same tire strategy.

Partly it is because we all run a lot of motor, there is practically zero stock racing in the UK even at club level, most of us are using .5 or 6.5 with boost and turbo indoors on carpet.

Partially it is because of the track layouts, most clubs put in so many features there are 3 times the acceleration zones as there are corners, it is that which kills the tyres.

The Schumacher Cactus tyre can look nearly perfect after a couple of runs and still give great side bite BUT the leading edge of the spike starts to round and you lose forward drive. As RandomConflict stated it is all so tight at the top you can't afford to give away a 10th per lap let alone a 20th/s on each of say 15 key acceleration points (corners and "features"), if you give away 0.75s/lap on a 20+ lap run you might as well stay in bed.

I'd love to see a bar or slick tyre that could be used on carpet without sauce as that would last for ages and the racing would be better but hey.

Spot on, the mod class died off on the turf track, presumably for this very reason, the club recently added a 1/10 dirt program (watered down with almost no tire wear) which runs side by side in the same event and now turf turnout is nearly dead, plus the number of entries in mod far out number the count in stock, complete reversal of turf head counts for mod/stock!

I'm gonna be honest, I have about 4 more sets of turf tires (which I buy in bulk) and when they are gone, I plan to convert my stock buggy over to mod to run on dirt... they're gonna need to figure out some sort of spec tire that doesn't wear if they want to get the numbers back up for the turf track, chances are it may just go away with dirt being more popular due to almost no tire wear.

I think you missed my point, I'm talking about limiting to 2 sets of tires which are rotated so that the first 3 runs of a new set are used the first 3 mains on days #1,#2 and #3, then they are downgraded to qualifier tires for day #4, #5 and #6 where the next new set of tires are used for the mains on those respective days. Simply use a sharpie to mark a tick for every run where 3 ticks on the front for the mains and 3 ticks on the rears for 3 days of quals to help keep track.

We don't mark our tires in this area for keeping track of other peoples tire wear, but I like the idea of having some sort of system where everyone is forced to running tires of equal wear. We were tossing around an idea where everyone agrees to run a spec chassis so there's no wheel offset concern and then fill a box of mounted tires with recorded number of runs so that they are all equal wear, then let folks randomly pull a set of tires from the box for each race.... things start to get complicated to implement this on a per heat or per day basis and if you don't get the same turnout from day to day, then some tires might have less wear than others, etc...

Anyway, I would call it "Nub Spec" where the idea is to run the tires down to "nubs" to maximize longevity where everyone has equal loss of performance due to equal wear.