Michelin sport cup pressures

[bkreigsr]

about to do my first ax with the new shoes tomorrow.
anyone know where I should start with psi?
car is 2265#, drilled bars, adj koni, 22/19 sways
tires are 205/55 16 on 16x6 fuchs
I had been running 24/26psi with my old Yokos and adjusting from there but these feel a lot stiffer.
thanks

[DanS911]

If you are talking about the MPSC tires, I hate to be the first to say it but......IMHO there is NO pressure that you are going to run that make those suckers stick. Run a search on this BB and you will get plenty of info. My experience (very not good) is thus:
With a car as light as yours you cannot get them to get hot enough to stick. Especially with a stiff suspension. Especially in an autoX.

My car weighs 2400# or so (it was 2465 at the time) and I gave up on them after numerous very exciting spins.
Even in So Fla I just couldn't generate enough heat in them and they would break away with no warning.
Obviously at an autoX you are in less dire straits but be VERY careful if you take them to the track.
I think the conclusion was that if your car weighs less than 3000# these may not be the tires for you.........but others may have different views.

[cstreit]

I'm with Dan... [Tina Turner] Ain't no pressure high enough [/Tina Turner].

MPSC's and lightweight cars don't mix for competition.

That being said, I'd target low 30's for hot pressures...

[78targa]

Well, I was at a track event last year that had Michelin support and their engineering team recommended target (hot) pressures between 38 and 40 psi.

Getting heat into them will be important, but of course at an autocross you aren't going to get the same heat into the tire as you would at the track.

They might work well for what you are doing. I recommend running them with a high and low pressure and see what works best. You won't have alot of time to dial them in, so you might want to make some agressive changes at first and then pick the direction you want to go.

Let us know how it goes!

[bkreigsr]

thanks Casey. for a minute there, I thought maybe I wasn't clear as to what I wanted answered in this thread.
I started with 25 front, 28 rear, then brought the rears down to 26 because I wasnt getting full contact shoulder to shoulder. I think that was a mistake, as the car only got looser at partial throttle. On the final run of 10 (2-5 run sessions) I decided to do a lot less part-throttle and more full throttle point-to-point and ended up cutting 2 sec off my best run of the previous 9 runs. Being limited to 205 cross section is a big handicap. It was a 50 sec course & the tires seemed to be heating up fine, compared to my previous Yoko's. Oh, and I won the class. See results at pca.org, nnjr autox later this week.

[78targa]

Congrats! Its great to hear you won your class.

You made an interesting observation about the tires regarding their shoulder. These tires seem to have a very rounded shoulder built in to their construction. I did the same thing and reduced pressures to try to increase the contact patch only to find they handled MUCH worse.

I do think they like higher pressures and the rounded shoulder "is what it is." Would it make sense to run them at a higher pressure and get them warmed up and then drop the pressures just before competition? Sounds like they felt best to you with a much lower pressure than I would have thought. I would definately think driving on them to the event would be most beneficial. Then again, I am not the best at autocross setups!

So were you at the NNJR Porschefest? I was at Watkins Glen that weekend.

[}{arlequin]

several club racers i've run into (longhoods w/ 2.7's) run 225's all around with hoosiers but when they run MPSC's they go down to 205's and 215's for the rear. otherwise they just don't get enough heat in them to stick.

i was in one of the cars being driven at about 3-4 seconds off the race pace and they stuck pretty good as far as I could tell

for auto-x i think you may have a hard time heating them up... i don't believe they were ever designed for auto-x (i'm sure they CAN be used but SHOULD they?)

is anyone out there touting them as a good auto-x tire? isn't it more expensive than even the hoosier?

[bkreigsr]

bought them as a de tire, then decided to use them full time on my 16x6s the street (not many miles) and eventually get a set of 710's for my 15x7's. I'm just a little short of funds now & am using them 'till the khumo's come thru. They were not bought for ax tire. I was just fishing for some feedback as to tire pressures, and should have expected the full magilla of responses I guess.

[DanS911]

should have expected the full magilla of responses I guess.

Yeah sorry about that I guess I wsn't really answering your question was I
I just didn't have a very positive experience with them and could see how they would be even worse as an autoX tire.

BTW the final blow with them was when I decided to just wear them out on the street. I got a ticket for "improper equipment, to
wit 4 bald tires"
"But officer they are DOT legal tires"
"Not worn down to the wear bars like that they're not!!"

[KTL]

Had good results with mine at 40 hot and even better results at 37 hot.

I ran 225/50-16 frt on 16x8 and 245/45-16 rear on 16x8 on my 87 Carrera. It took them awhile to heat up, around 3-4 laps, and when the heat built they were pretty grippy. I was pleased with their grip and they were quite predictable. I have run Victoracers in the past and found them to get a little greasy (front end push) late in the session. I'm still learning R tires (three events under my belt) and my car, so take that for what it's worth

Funny thing was, the tires were suprisingly forgiving in the rain. We had two sessions in heavy rain and I was quite comfortable with them. Ran decent times and wasn't getting passed by everybody. The MPSC's were a vast improvement over my Yokohama ES100 in the rain. I was very unnerved and all over the place driving on those in the rain during a previous event.

[bkreigsr]

ditto on the rain control. I drove home 250 miles from my last event in solid rain the whole way. although I would not recommend the mpsc as a rain tire, they offer a lot more control than my yokos.
found optimum to be right at 38 lbs (hot) all for corners on my 2,650 lb 930.