For those of you who have lowered your Mini and use rear sway bars, can you tell me what tire pressure you use for the street and track?

I have H-sport, no adjustment on the rear camber yet, and Madness sway bar set in mid postion.

 

There have been alot of discussions on inflation pressure here lately. When your dealing with modified vehcles I sugest using a pyrometer to take tire tread cap temperatures. This allows you set you pressures acoridng to your individual setup

Alex

>>For those of you who have lowered your Mini and use rear sway bars, can you tell me what tire pressure you use for the street and track?
>>
>>I have H-sport, no adjustment on the rear camber yet, and Madness sway bar set in mid postion.

 

Care to elaborate? Is there a rule of thumb about temperature that you can follow? The run flats seem to react very differently with only small changes in pressure, so I'm interested in knowing if there's a better way than seat of the pants (which aint all bad, I s'pose.)

Jeff

 

You want the temperature to be the same or very close across the width of the tire, outside, middle and inside.

Tire pressure also depends on tires, which were not mentioned in the initial post. I have Falken Azenis 215/45/16 on a non-lowered car with Alta rear sway bar at stiff setting. I ran at Roebling Road a few weeks ago and found that starting cold with 31 in the front and 33 in the rear netted the scrub marks on the tire to end right where the little arrow indicators are on the sidewall of the tire.

Randy had suggested 35 front, 37 rear. When running that high, I found my scrub marks to be no where near the sidewall marker. Randy is in Colorado, I'm at sea level in South Carolina. Not 100% certain that makes a big difference but I would imagine it makes some difference.

 

I don't know much about about tire pressure, but any reading you would get on a guage is relative to the ambiant pressure. So, there would be absolutely no difference in any effects on a tire at a reading of 37 at sea level as there would be at 37 in the mountains. Yes, the pressure in absolute terms would be higher at sea level, but both inside and outside of the tire.

In order to futher illustrate, if you fill your tire to 37 at sea level and drive up to the mountains, your tire readings would actually increase, and you would have to release some air in order to get back to 37.

 

But bear in mind all inflation pressures are set cold, so if you drove anywhere and let air out of your tires you'd be potentially undernflating them.

Alex