Learning how to diagnose tires

I do not, and I’m out of town for a week

If you are struggling with binding, going to new tires is going to make it worse. The added grip will just compound the root issue. You may want to see if your “respected team owner” can take a look at your setup and advise you on how to free up the kart. Learning to drive on a bad setup can actually slow your progress. Ask me how I know. Learing to drive on a slightly off setup is not a bad thing, but if the kart is not working like it is supposed to no amount of seat time is going to fix that.

You can’t look at those tires and say I don’t need new ones, haha. The plan is to first check the alignment on the ground with me in the kart. I suspect that is off, especially since it was aligned without me in it, and the tire wear fits excessive toe-in. For good measure, I’ll also raise the rear ballast as well as rear ride height. Those three changes plus new tires should get me to a much better place

Here’s the rear right. Both rears had similar wear and similar striations. Guys at the track thought they were just from a slide. I did have a spin when warming up, and I was the only kart on track, so there could’ve easily been some gravel or whatnot that I helped clean up. Still, I’d expect more of an arc if they were scratches from a spin. They seem too perfectly straight and parallel for me to just comfortably accept the spin theory.

I have removed the tires and will be picking up new ones soon. I also raised both the rear ride height as well as the rearmost lead. I checked the alignment, and the front was at -1.3° camber in the air. With me in the seat and the kart on the ground, this went past about -5°, so I think that was a major contributor. I put the front bar back in (Nylon), and pulled a lot of the camber out. Hoping I can get some test laps in this week

I have seen these straight horizontal scratches like that. And yeah, while it’s kind of like the flat slide tire markings, it’s too subtle to be that. There would be more scuff.

I wonder what gives those individual little straight cuts

Since it matches the scratches on the front, I wonder if it is the substructure of the tire failing? If the ply underneath the rubber is not doing its job, the rubber could potentially crack along those plies.

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I’m getting an interesting wear pattern on my inside front tire at Fremont Raceway Park. The track is heavily left turn biased (only one significant right turn). Kart is a Margay Ignite. Tires are MG Red SH2 at 14 psi on a sunny 65 degree day. I have 30 mm inside the wheel and the rear width is 52”. I’ve been removing camber to try and free the kart up and have been somewhat successful. Any thoughts on how to improve the wear pattern on the inside tire? I’m at the track on my phone so I’m not sure how the pix will display. First of two features coming up. The first pic is the problem tire. I switch them each session to keep the wear somewhat even. TIA!


Left front looks good, right front has a ton of pick up, like you aren’t working it hard enough.