Weird Tire Wear, educated opinions?
 

I've been noticing some abnormal wear on my front RE-11s. I'm hoping some of the knowledgable community members might have some ideas/suggestions. There are two wear patterns I'm noticing.

First, there is a lot of wear on the outer sidewall/tread junctions. It looks slightly scooped out like 'cupping' but it's consistent all the way around the tire.

Second and more noticeable, the outer tread blocks have heel-toe wear. If you look at the tread blocks on the top of the driver's side tire, the blocks are higher toward the front of the car and lower toward the back. I'm wondering if I overheated the tires on my track day and heavy braking deformed the tread. I never noticed this wear prior to my track day in 95F weather.

What do you guys think? I'll try to post some pics, but it's difficult to convey in photos.

Umm limme see piks?

It's fine, my 265 had the same wear

I'm gonna swap the fronts in the AM before my autoX event.

Is it only fronts or all the way around?

Just the fronts. Rears look great.

Check out this site:
How to read tire wear

Pics, pls.

Sounds like you're wearing the outside shoulder because of the limited camber in the front. The cupping could be a sign of a weird toe setting though.

Cupping isn't caused by toe. Cupping isn't very common compared to toe or camber issues. Usually it's from a WAY out of whack balance, pos tires or blown shocks/struts.

http://www.aa1car.com/library/tirewear_chart.gif

need to see pics. First is likely from overdriving camber settings, or really bad alignment.

Is the second like a front-t0-back feathering?

Definitely from lack of camber on the road course HPDE. Yep, the heel-toe is front to back feathering. After my autocross today, the wear pattern has started to normalize. I think the stock suspension just brutalizes the front tires on track days. I don't really have cupping, but the extreme outside tread border where it meets the wall has a pink finger width of grooving. I'm wondering if it's due to rolling over onto the stiff sidewall on the road course.

my tires did the same thing on my vw... it might be a little to do with spacers... mine never did it for 60k and then bam wierd *** tire wear and i had the same 20m back but 10 up front

Hmmm. I can't see how properly installed spacers would do it. They don't change anything other than track width.

I'm suspecting it's mostly effects of geometry changes during track days. I'm wondering if there may also be an element related to the tire width on the front. I'm running 265 on the stock sport wheels. I could see how squeezing some tires on smaller than ideal rims could lead to altered tire shape and wear patterns. I didn't think 265 was out of spec though.

Hm. The F/R wear is usually on older cars when I've seen it. My 540i had issues with it around 200,000 miles due to worn out bushings. I'd guess the stiffer sidewall might be pushing the suspension a bit harder. Are you on stock suspension?

Last year there was some discussion on the Forum about the uneven tire wear on the outer treads of our tires. I had the issue and discussed it with the Nissan GTR tech at the dealership.

He said that because of the factory set camber, that's the way the tires will wear, and there's no adjustment to correct it. I think there is on the rear, but not the front, or on the front but not the rear, not sure about that.

He said that the Z is designed for the track - specifically cornering - and if you drive 60 mph-ish, you will not place enough force on the suspension to "level out" the tire.

Going through curves at racing speeds, the tire will level out and all the treads will make contact. I accepted that answer, but never felt real solid about it.

Even at the track, you're not always in a curve! What about the straight away?

It is hard to watch the tire wear past State Inspection just because one to two treads have worn below the allowable depth to pass State Inspection.

Does anyone have some input on this? If an adjustment could be made, I'd do it tomorrow. I don't drive my Z like it's on the track and would gladly give up the full track performance if it would extend the life of my tires.

The rear tires on the Z have negative camber that probably evens out (goes to 0 camber) during cornering. The front tires are factory set with near 0 camber. When tracking, cornering shifts the camber to positive and wears the outer edges more than the inner. Ideally, a track setup would have more front negative camber and leave the rear alone.

Stock Z has -1.8 or so in the back, nearly -1 in the front. It's not exactly zero.

Does this mean that there's no adjustment to keep the outer edges from wearing so much more than the inner?

Buy a harder tire and check your toe, your tire should last a lot longer