I hear the ‘fun’ squealing and imagine the short lives of their tires. But is this true? If so, why not?
In: Physics
The skid marks you see are actually melted asphalt, not deposited rubber.
https://www.howitworksdaily.com/what-causes-tyre-marks/#:~:text=It%20might%20look%20like%20pieces%20of%20rubber%20from,road%20to%20melt%20and%20rise%20to%20the%20surface. Because nobody believes me.
But yes it’s awful for your tires. If you could hold a power slide for a few minutes, that would be it, tires gone. Probably down to an illegal tread depth in under a minute.
But you have to consider what mileage they do. Tires age as well as wear. You get maybe 5 years out of a pair, and maybe 10-50k miles of normal use depending on how sticky the compound. If you factor in that car nuts often have summer and winter tires (climate dependent), their fun weekend/nice weather car might come nowhere close to this mileage in that time. Meaning they have rubber to burn.
Spinning the tires in order to break traction and leave tire marks behind DOES wear out the tread on those tires much faster than normal usage. The wear will be generally even across the full surface, as opposed to when one skids to a stop under severe braking (absent anti-lock brakes).
A lot of the people who do burnouts and fat skids either a) don’t care, b) use cheap tires so they also don’t care or c) do so when the tires are all ready worn out, so doing so for short periods of time (obviously doing a burnout for a few minutes straight will quickly burn the tire until it’s busted and needs replacing) won’t negatively impact the performance of the tire since it’s already bald, it can’t get any balder, and at this point they probably don’t care about replacing them since the baldness just makes them more slippery and slippery=easier to pop skids and burnouts
Yes, transferring material from the tire to the road means it’s no longer part of the tire. If this is done regularly, it will dramatically reduce the life of the tire.
Doing a burnout is pretty fun, and yes it does obviously wear the tires more quickly than normal. Breaking traction and spinning the tires rapidly heats them. This causes the outermost layer to start to melt away. This is what causes the white smoke you see around tires that are doing this and what causes the tire marks you see, as the hot rubber is transferred to the road. If it’s a short burnout, this doesn’t really use up much tire life, although still much more rapidly than normal use. The longer you hold the burnout the more heat goes into the tires and the more quickly they break down. So if you’re just doing a little 1-2 launch burnout you might not even use up a noticeable amount of tread. If you do a prolonged burnout you can destroy the tires on the spot, and everywhere in between.
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