Originally Posted by odpurple
Your point about mounting your own donuts is well taken. I still do this some but most people here won't do it. And you are also right that they were more expensive when they first came out (of course I have no clue what prices are like in Europe). I am confused about your statement that they have half the life of standard tires, since our experience here is that they wear very well (I guess some people want to run the tires down to the rim!). They also don't seem to chunk as easily as standard tires which also makes them a good value. I'm saying all this as a person who doesn't run wraps, I've just felt that the arguments against them are spurious.
In the end we are talking about the same thing, getting more people into 1/12th. Whatever rule accomplishes this is ok with me.
We usually reckon that there is a usable 6mm diameter in a set of tyres for the Club racer, and wraps have much less thickness of usable foam. However, I didn't realise that they only make them in Pink compound, which is very hard-wearing anyway. Perhaps that explains why you don't see the wear rate as an issue. If they were in grey compound, they wouldn't last very long at all!
Again, on the chunking issue, my experience of pinks (non-wrap) is that they don't chunk as easily as grey (pink are quite tough!) so one might expect them to be the same in a wrap form.
In UK on our carpets, and with our non-smelly additive, pink tyres are not as good as greys. I notice that pink rears are often quoted as a good tyre choice for US tracks, but here we always use grey for Club, and only use pink at very few of our National meetings. The default tyre choice here is grey/purple - we have no outdoor venues for 12th.
Pricing has improved, but not so long ago, we paid in £ what you paid in dollars - about 1.8 times as much, in other words! If the quoted US street price is right ($14 to $16 a pair), we pay about $18 to $24 a pair in the UK for standard foams - not wraps - irrespective of compound.
I don't have anything against wraps (like you, haven't run them) but you can see where we came from on a cost viewpoint.