Has anyone here done any worthwhile data collection of infared tyre temps? I’ve never really played around with it in karting but wondered if the sensors are worth investing in.
One of my goals this year is to get some temp data. I’ll be bringing my temp gun with me this weekend to collect some data.
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Someone made something related that might be of interest.
I thought at one time Mychron had or was developing some tire temps sensors for the 5.
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I’ve only seen one kart with temp sensors, but at the same time I’d only run them during a test day.
Mychron’s tyre sensors look good but I can’t find any sample data to test whether it’s viable in any way.
yep you can buy them AiM Tyre Temperature Sensor Kit | AimShop.com
Really want to get into some detail with this kind of stuff, but with sensors sometimes the data can be almost indecipherable
Yeah I’d have to pass on that. 660$ is a bit much.
Maybe just zip tie some HF inferred readers and look at during practice, lol.
Expensive indeed (if I could build my own I would, but I aint smarts in the brains), but this sport is about managing tyres and god knows how much we spend on those damn things trying to figure them out.
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I feel like anything I could learn from a $660 IR sensor, I could also glean from just looking at the tire surface, reading pressures and recording temperatures with my $20 temp gun. Within a few sessions making some minor chassis adjustments and correlating with driver feedback, you should be able to at least get an overall picture of how the kart is treating its tires and how each adjustment is affecting the tire.
If I come up with any interesting conclusions this weekend, I’ll share them here.
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I’m curious to know what you find out, as tire temp was a topic of discussion at my last test day.
I would think you’d want 3-4 sensors across the whole tread to see what’s really going on temp-wise, and enough testing to know what a “good handling” kart gave you for tire data vs. ill-handling. I suspect that temps across the tread don’t always correlate evenly. That said, what I’d do is get an IR camera, mount it to the seat pointing at the tire in question, go do some laps, and see the results. iPhone’s had an IR camera at one point… I’d also be inclined to put a thermocouple into a rim and see the temp deltas over a race…
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I’d go with IR instead of sensors because noise can be difficult to filter out, between the vibration and wavelengths involved, etc.
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uses a wide-angle IR sensor which can be logged depending on your data acquisition setup.
I used to track a few years ago and got away from it after Randy was able to start telling me more of what the kart was doing and what he wanted. Was easier for me to decipher issues using the gun with the young driver.
Maybe I should bring it back out and take some notes just to see correlation between the nut behind the wheel and the nut with the gun 
It’s been done a few times. Most notably by Tonykart back in (I think) 2006. I remember reading an article about how they used the data from testing to conserve tires during a WC event and attributed their win to it.
Of course I can’t find that article now.
It was a three sensor (per tire) setup. I can’t remeber what they used for data acquiring. PI maybe?
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Intrigues me that this has been so decisive for do long. If top tier motorsports won’t be without tyre temp logging, why are we without it? Ground zero of our sport is engine and tyre management, so I’d have thought that tyre temp logging would be even up with engine temp logging.
Those who swear by tread patterns - at what point in the past do tread patterns represent? Presumably several degrees below the max value in the corner before the pits? If so, is that useful information?
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That’s why i posted the wide-angle sensor as it accomplishes reading the whole tire surface in one sensor. I think you need an AIM MXL or better to log the data from those, though.
example of them via video overlay:
EDIT: I know it is prohibitively expensive to run and analyze any of this. But, the potential here is quite massive.
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Really my aim would be to measure temperatures throughout the session under the most severe load and so on so the post session temperature analysis wouldn’t be enough. You are right that the price for the sensor kit is obscenely high for the AIM stuff but I don’t have a huge amount of choice
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