report on the Yo' Mama A032 R tires at the track (long)

[Tessie McMillan]

... and it ain't good! &:-) One of my Alfa friends coined the term "Yo'
Mama", and I really think it fits. This is so disheartening, because I am a
die-hard Yokohama fan. I drove an '87 911 Carrera for five years, mostly on
Yokohama tires (A008, A008RSII). I have the Yoko AVS intermediates on my
Alfa Spider. I thought the Advan A032R would be fabulous for my '88 80
Quattro, but instead, they are like driving on butterballs! Which isn't so
bad, per se, except that it's not really the effect I'm going for here.
*Definitely* makes things more tricky in the turns, and under heavy braking.

I'll spare you the minute-by-minute report, but suffice it to say that I
drove my new tires at our Alfa club track event today at SIR. I started
high. I lowered by small increments. When I lost steering input I lowered
the fronts more. Since I thought it would be a hot day, I started at 42 and
never went below 39 on any wheel (although I tried a heckuva lot of
combinations in between.) But I still ended up chunking my right front tire
during my second session, so I had to stop in the middle of the day, sweat
over a hot floor jack, swap my right-side wheels and then tweak the
pressures all over again. In the end I gave up, and left the pressures at a
spot that made the tires drive like butterballs again. (I just pretended I
was driving a go-kart.)

-----> I mean, the whole point of the R compound tire was to avoid chunking
another tire! I've gone through so many sets of street tires (each set good
for one track day) <------

Now lest you label me a doofus in the tire tech area, I'll share that there
were several of us at the event running these tires, and ALL of us had
trouble. One of my friends, who drives an almost-race-car Alfetta coupe
(Alfa Romeo, evenly-balanced 4-cylinder RWD with transaxle), told me his
tires were handling like cr*p. We diced together all day, and he had the
squiggles almost as badly as I did in some places, although I don't think
his car was pushing nearly as much as mine. He tried tweaking his pressures
up when I went down -- although he had started in the 30s and I in the 40s.
And with the butterballs, well, I didn't think increasing pressure would
help me.

So if you've driven with these tires, I'd be curious to hear about the
conditions under which you drive them. How much does your car weigh?
Anti-sway bar, yes? Autocross vs. track? If the track, do you have any
serious elevation change, or is it all flat? SIR is counterclockwise (the
way we run it), has elevation change, and has turns that just wear the right
front tires down to the bone.

Tess
in Seattle WA, U.S.A.
p.s. - about that Swedish thread: what about bringing some... er...  thing
Swedish to Seattle, too? &:-)

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