Saturday 23rd April - Fitting new tyres

When be bought our Carlsson it was fitted with two unbranded tyres and two Bridgestone snow tyres, which were well past their best. Clearly we needed to find some suitable replacements before our first Trackday.

We visited local tyre specialist RLG Tyres to discuss what options were available to us. Chris Wells (owner) was very enthusiastic about our project and agreed to do what he could top help. After reviewing the cost and availability of the various high performance and semi-race tyres available we chose Toyo's newly released Proxie R888 track-day tyre. The R888 is a medium-soft tyre with very stiff sidewalls and an aggressive 'V' pattern tread, these tyres promised excellent performance in both wet and dry conditions, saving time at the trackside in changing weather conditions, as well as negating the need for a second set of wheels and tyres.

R888s are available in a range of sizes, the nearest being 205/55 R16. This is the standard size for later Aeros, but has a slightly taller sidewall than the standard Carlsson, however, even with our 40mm lowered suspension, there didn't seem to be any clearance issues when we tried other tyres of that size.

RLG tyres mounted the new tyres to our 3 spoke "Aero" rims before balancing them to an accuracy of 0.01g a much tighter tolerance than normal tyre centres use.

Before heading out onto the track we were advised to scrub the tyres in to achieve maximum grip, we were also keen to test Toyo's claims of excellent performance in both dry and wet conditions. The R888 is fully road legal to allow people to drive to and from their track-days, so the simplest way to test the tyres was to fit them to one of our own road-cars. Later that afternoon the wheels and tyres were duly fitted to Chris's 9000 Aero.

The following week Chris used his car for his normal 400 mile weekly commute of varied roads. Chris was amazed at the transformation these tyres made to all-round handling on an otherwise standard Aero. General grip and steering response massively improved, the only downside being an increase in road noise. The greater surprise came later in the week as wet weather set in, however the track-day tyres lived up to their claim of wet weather performance, settling any fears of a wet track for our first outing. We were stunned that merely changing the tyres could have such a dramatic effect on the car's handling, and could not wait to test them fully on the race-track.