The good news is that RA-1's have proven once again to be an excellent and long-lasting tire for us, and that is the tire we will be using for 2010.
Most of the guys who ran R888's were very disappointed, even though they had jumped through the hoops and setup their cars and driving for them. They proved that they could pull off comparable lap times to RA-1's in qualifying and practice, but their performance fell off badly about 1/3 to 1/2 of the way through our big 45 min race (which was actually about 38 minutes from green to checker). Those who qualified well had trouble maintaining their position in the race, and it was clearly not a "spec" race with two very different tires in use. The odd one out here is Joe, who apparently found the magic combination for R888's, because he was the only one who seemed to be at all happy with them. Either way, R888's and extensive car/tire development does not support our "low cost, equal racing".
And that's for R888's that were in their "prime" as far as heat cycles and tread life go. I personally learned a few things about their life expectancy vs RA-1's... I chose to run 20+ heat cycle R888's from this season for both qualifying days, knowing that they were lacking in performance. They were still far from being corded, but were just heat-cycled out. What I didn't realize was just how horrible they were at that point. I switched to trash-pile RA-1's from 2007 with 30+ heat-cycles for Saturday and instantly picked up a solid 2-3 seconds in the practice session.
My best on the dead R888's was a 2:24.4, and that didn't come easy. I qualified 20th out of 34 for the main race on them. Then I went out on the beat-to-hell RA-1's, did a warm-up / feel-out-the-car lap, then ran 2:22 like it was nothing while impeded by another car, and then did another lap to get a 2:21, also somewhat impeded. It was ridiculous how much faster the old RA-1's were, when they had almost twice the wear and use on them, and by all other indications should have been worse than the R888's I had. My alignment isn't even optimized for RA-1's, and they were physically heavier than my R888's too. The tread on those RA-1's were, by no exaggeration, the worst condition tires I've ever driven on a track, but yet they were still reasonably competitive. They were even still good enough during the race to get within a second of the race winner's best lap time. This proves that we have a consistent and long-lasting tire, which remains mostly competitive a while after its prime.
So... RA-1's = great, as long as we don't get jacked in price. R888's = good for qualifying and short races, and they only last 2 or maybe 3 race weekends before they heat-cycle out.
