That is the accusation laid out by a poster on Camaro 5. The accusation? According to 'Sirloin' the Camaro appears to be wearing shaved tires. Interestingly enough he posted pics to make his case and they do present a rear view of the ZL1 which shows almost no tread on the outer edges of the tires and a minimal amount of tread across the tire as a whole. Somebody suggested that this may be a 'post race' pic, but if that is the case then MT literally wore out a set of SC2s during their track session. I'll let you guys draw your own conclusions. Take a gander.

http://www.camaro5.com/forums/showthread.php?t=198308

 

without time stamps on the pictures we wont know if they are pre or post race.

 

When it comes to Motor Trend nothing really surprises me anymore.

 

Wouldn't be the first time GM lied to anyone.

 

My question is whether you could realistically even wear down a set of SC2's that much without having the track session of the century.

 

Thread closed in 8 minutes so Sirloin started another one.


Camaro5 is for morons. You either drink the Kool-Aid or they shut you down. They won't even acknowledge the pics.

I am so glad I am free to think one own and choose to buy a Mustang. What a bunch of brain dead robots.

 

Hey, like that guy said "tire wear doesn't make it a track tire" LOL

 

That's fine. But they can't live with it might be true, so they shut it down.


We only shut down filth and repititoin. They shut down questions.

 

This really has me wondering now. Even if the Camaro picture is post test that would seem to be a lot of tire wear for one track test. If Chevy shaved the tires prior to delivering the car it wouldn't be something that would drastically stand out on delivery since all the tread pattern would still be there, there would just be less of it. If the tires were shaved that might explain why the tires look absolutely wore out in what seem to be post test pics.

 

That does look like a post race pic of the tires. I wouldn't say they are shaved, wore out is more in line with how the edges look. A road course is hard on both the inner and outer edges due to sidewall flex and the tire leaning over in turns. I also don't think it would be worth 2 seconds to shave a tire on factory G2's. If you're gonna go through the trouble of trying to cheat there are better ways to cover it up. Why not just have Goodyear send some factory G2's in a softer compound, it's not as hard as you would think. Just tell them it's for development work, they'll do anything to be the supplier on any car and make any tire to suit your needs.

 

Maybe their tires are special, but mine don't grip for **** when they're worn down. So I don't see the benefit of this...

 

a reduced tread depth minimizes the tread elements squirming around giving better grip if the tires were indeed shaved. In your case any stability offered by reduced tread depth is offset by heat cycling which hardens the rubber in your tire.

An other trick in the book is to spec out a reformulated OE tire fitment which may have created a case where these tires wore at a much faster rate (would be odd against the R compund tires on the Boss LS though).

Car manufacturers do this both for magazine tests and when you test drive a vehicle and purchase it brand new. You will rave about the handling and braking and hate how fast they wear out.

Replacement tires even in the same brand and catagory are typically a little bit harder so that they will last longer and since your replacing worn out rubber that has hardened up over time, you wont miss the little bit of extra grip afforded by the original OE tires. This typically shows up in the wear rating on the tires.

As an example the OE tires might have a 200 tread wear rating and the same replacement tire might have a 400 tread wear rating unless they are selling the exact OE tire as a replacement (I've only seen this a few times)

 

Given that they were worn more on the outside edges rather than evenly across the tread, as you would find in shaved tires, indicates to me that the ZL1, if not starting the testing with somewhat worn tires, certainly finished it that way. What with the 550+ hp the ZL1 has, that would be very easy to do.

Perhaps to be fair to the Nth degree, MT should insist that the cars supplied to them all start with fresh rubber, but I'm guessing that the ZL1 supplied to them was simply pulled from the press pool and they didn't have much choice in the matter.

While shaved/word tires might, well, shave some fine decimal points off some of the test numbers, in whole, I think the overall standing of the two cars to each other is still valid.

 

camber?

 

I wouldn't put it past chevy...but my guess is they shaved 'em just enough and MT obviously wore them down on the track giving them a more natural wear appearance...