Buggy tires without spikes
 

I am trying to drum up support for buggy racing at my local club, but am concerned about the carpet wear caused by spiked tires. I remember back in the day people used to run foam tires on buggys and have seen some pictures of buggy slicks for clay tracks, but I'm having some trouble tracking any down in the UK. I think the best way to go would be to have a control tire which was carpet friendly. Does anyone out there in forum land have any info that might help me? If we have a control tire I guess it would be best to have something that wasn't mounted for the different hexes and also we would be running 2wd and 4wd.

Cheers

Ben

the wear on the carpet will be hardly noticeable with spike tyres our club has had the same carpet for a long time and we always you spike tyre and you can barley tell its been run on

Our club uses proline dirthawgs on carpet, the grips quite good with addative, and most of our members are still using the same set of tires for the second season, a few even ran on tarmac with the touring cars though summer.

Surely the additive ruins the carpet quicker (10 folder quicker), than a spiked tyre. :eh?:

It depends on the additive Chris, a wintergreen based additive will kill the user as well as the carpet though :o

Yeh thats true, I used to use that stuff too, was ace.

But even on modern additives, it leaves a darkened line on the carpet - look at the carpet NERCR uses on the straight - its a great big piece of carpet which had been used by the BRCA for a demonstration and now NERCR have it, in just one demo it has black zig zags up it from additives. Yet a year or 2, or 3, of racing at NERCR with spikes on it and its just as good today as the first day they got it.

Spikes do no harm.

In fact, the carpet in question has only been used for one buggy meeting (the NERCR regional a few months ago), and although there is no damage from the spikes, the carpet was quite heavily damaged (many rips) from where it had been used to cover a jump.

The heavy lines on the carpet are probably not from additive, the edges are sharp, defined semi-circles, I think it is more to do with what has been placed on the carpet in the past or how it was stored, it's like the carpet's colour has been bleached.

Spikes - probably not so bad, especially soft compound small spikes. Wouldn't like to see a regional run on blue full spikes. Jumps (and exposed shock towers) are pretty bad for carpet though.

Are you sure? (you'd know better than me) it just I remember seeing it at temple park in 2007 on the straight and that when I got told where it came from, and the same carpet was used this year. The darkened lines are like its been 1 of several strips of carpet, hence it is not a continuous darkened line, just the corners it has covered. Don't remember any rips in it, that was the carpet over the big jump wasn't it?

Anyway, if you consider how many clubs have had carpet for so long yet they run spikes every time which is regular, clubs like York, Teesside, Worksop, Southport indoors. The carpet is in good condition still, no signs of damage from tyress.

I guess it makes sense that if we lower the amount of grip the cars have then they wheelspin more and wear the carpet that way. I hadn't thought of the problem of shock towers on the carpet and I think the carpet wear caused by landing form jumps will put pay to that idea. Maybe we could attach some old carpet to the back of the jumps so we could have a removable landing strip?

Thanks to everyone for their input. The speed and volume of responses always amazes me

Ben

We have run our primafelt carpet now at Watford for 7 years which includes racving bhuggies on minipins and touring cars with addative every single thursday night, plus six seasons of a 150+ entry winter series for both buggies and saloon, four two day race meetings on it PLUS the BRCA Indoor finals on it for 2 days with buggies a few years back also. Our carpet is still going strong and shows no signs of heavy wear anyhwere, at this rate it will be good for many, many more years to come.

As far as jumps go, just run a strap of old/spare carpet after any jump sections, which should protect any landing areas/popular crash zones from rips and tears.

I'm pretty sure that the previous season at Temple Park was some other carpet, NERCR had a variety of old rolls for buggy meetings, unfortuately a lot of that was lost during the many equipment moves the club had to do over the last couple of years.

Just to clear this up, it was the same carpet in 2007 and 2008, the one that was used for 1/12th demos.

Has anyone tried Schumacher yellow minipins? Those boys up at Newbury dont seem to have any problems with carpet wear with these tyres. Afterall, they're soft and have only small pins as opposed to full spikes.

thats the only tyre i ever use on carpet