Originally Posted by L.Fairtrace

Yes they have traditionally been a Medium/30 tire.

What we've experienced at our track since laying down the subfloor and using new carpet this year is that the Mediums(in their current form) produce an insane amount of grip even for 20-30 cars on a club race day. So much that many many cars are traction rolling violently. I think this is a product of both the medium tires and the way we laid the carpet down as a single piece seamed together with seamtape and stretched as opposed to gluing the whole thing down or gluing at the seams. This violent traction rolling was/is actually causing our carpet to be damaged from the violent traction rolling and body posts and axles ripping the rug. This is not the reason we chose Hards but its a small factor.

This has also been happening at many of the larger races this year. The snowbirds and IIC particularly. Where gluing sidewalls of tires is a major factor in how well your car handles.

We are not looking for a race that makes people miserable and want to quit rc.

So we started testing Hard Solaris tires. What I personally found was using them and changing nothing else on our high grip made my car maybe .1 slower per lap. But there was absolutely no tendency for the car to traction roll anymore and no need for sidewall glue. Yet the car still handled exactly the same with no setup changes. And they last a good bit longer as well. I found that the 2-5th run the car got faster. Which was not happening on Mediums.

Most of the manufactures tires vary from batch to batch and it seems that in the last 6 months or so the batches of all brands of tires, Sweep, Gravity, Jaco, Solaris all are leaning in the soft direction.

I will say this. The Hards that we have been testing with are softer than the Jacos from the 2014 snowbirds which was an extremely hard "medium" tire. Since then the jacos have swung back in the softer direction though.

We want to have the most enjoyable race possible and we will have plenty of grip with harder tires. Anyone that has raced there this year will attest to that.

I think the right decision has been made. Now we just have to hope that people actually show up and cause the grip to be high.