tire pressure on the track

wstar

The general idea is you guess a good temperature and then measure after each session to dial it in.

In an ideal world, you pull into the hot pit during a hot lap with the tires fully warmed up and have a friend check the tires with a pyrometer as fast as possible. You want 3x readings on each tire (left, center, right of the tread face). In a less than ideal world, you can wait till you come in from the session and hit those 3 areas on the surface with an IR thermometer. If the pressure's right, you should be seeing approximately even temps. If the center's hotter they're overinflated, if the center's colder they're underinflated. If there's a gradient from left to right on the temps, your alignment isn't right (e.g. needs more front camber if the front inner edge is colder).

You can also generally tell just by looking closely at the tire after a session and noting how the rubber is wearing/melting (hopefully evenly). Another similar method is to mark over the shoulder corner with some chalk (like an inch of tread and an inch of the sidewall), and see where the chalk gets scraped off. If it's set right, the edge of the chalk should end up at the edge of the tread surface...

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