Reading your rubber tires
 

What are some clues for your set up you can get from looking at your tires? Its pretty easy to see if your camber is correct with foam tires, but with rubber, is there any clues?

Our track only allows Jack the Gripper, and I have been using CS27s. Is the pick up/graining/blistering (I don't know what you call it, its like eraser shavings that stick to the tires that you can easily scratch off with light fingernail pressure) a clue? i don't have a personal transponder so checking my lap times, unfortunatly, isn't an option, so should I be getting this pick up on the tire? Driving problem? Stop grinding the tires; less slide more glide? If I run out an entire pack (15 minutes) the build up is hardly there, if at all. If I didn't like the set up and quite early, it is pretty heavy. If the car feels good, and I start driving well, the tires start to make noise in a couple of turns, kind of like a low squeal. Sometimes it's a sort of machine gun chirping sound, which kind of leads me to the question if I have a camber issue, or I just need a damping adjustment.

I ran off road for a while. then I bought a used FT TC4 with foam tires, used them up, now moved on to rubber premounts in anticipation of eventually racing it (the foam class seems to have died here). I started with the manual recomendations for each tire type, and made small changes from there. I am using a one way in front.

The stuff you are seeing on your tires is just the junk on your track from running. You are probably picking up foam bits as well as a little rubber mixed with the traction compound already on your track. Clean the tires after every run and you should not have a traction issue at all. The sound you hear from your tires is the fact you have good traction and it is hooking up. You really don't want to hear anything for if you do that only means you are scrubbing speed through the corners. You should be able to maintain corner speed w/o much scrubbing at all. This could be the setup or just the way you drive the car, really hard to say since I can't see either.