Which drag radial is best

The first thing that you need to decide when choosing new performance tires is the weather compound. Today, you can find summer, all-season, and even winter performance tires. However, in reality, only summer tires work very well for drag racing. Even though enthusiasts might not like them, there is nothing wrong with all-season tires. For the majority of people, these tires offer safe handling, high levels of traction and grip, and very good highway stability.

Moreover, all-season tires work in most weather conditions, including freezing and scorching hot temperatures, and over rain and light snow. This means that you can use only one set of tires in most places on earth, which is very cost-effective. On that note, all-season tires also last very, very long. As a result of that, even some all-season ultra-high-performance tires come with a 50, to 60,mile treadwear warranty, which is certainly impressive. With that said, the tread compound of all-season tires is pretty hard.

This helps with durability but hurts performance. A lot. They are fine for the street, but not good enough for racing purposes. So, there you have it. If you thought about installing all-season tires on a vehicle that you prepare for drag racing, think again.

We strongly recommend going for all-season tires only if you drive your vehicle on the street, where these tires are at their best. Anything competitive should be out of the question! That tread compound that we mentioned in all-season tires is completely different in summer tires. Instead of a long-wearing rubber, the compound in summer tires is designed for performance. The sticky nature of the summer tread compound helps immensely on drag strips.

With a set of summer tires, your vehicle will put the power down much easier and without a lot of wheel slip. You will immediately cut some precious seconds from your quarter-mile time. Summer tires are outstanding on the street as well.

For performance cars, we still prefer a set of summer tires, simply because they are much more responsive, offer outstanding levels of grip and traction, and exceptional high-speed stability. And, even though many people think otherwise, summer tires work better in rainy conditions, especially on damp roads.

In fact, they might get easily damaged if used or stored in temperatures that fall below the freezing point. Furthermore, summer tires wear much faster than all-season tires, which means that they are much less cost-effective in the long run.

Finally, summer tires are also much more expensive to buy. Honestly, though, if you want strong acceleration on a drag strip, summer tires are the only choice. Sure, you need to live with their downsides as well, but they are a small price to pay for achieving that outstanding quarter-mile time. Apart from the weather compound, performance tires differentiate in other things as well.

Some of them are focused on street driving, like high-performance and ultra-high-performance tires. These tires will work on a drag strip as well, but not as successfully as other performance tires. Max-performance tires, on the other hand, try to offer excellent street performance with usable track and drag traction. Extreme-performance tires get everything up a notch and offer much better traction and grip on racing tracks.

Moreover, there are also specialized racing and autocross-only tires and specialized drag tires. These tires are designed only for use on the track or drag strip. These tires are designed to offer the driver a better feel through the steering wheel and more responsive handling. The tread compound and tread pattern on these tires are designed for safe handling on public roads, including driving over dry and wet surfaces.

These tires are the favorite among car enthusiasts that mostly drive on the street, but want a dependable option for track days. Max-performance tires offer outstanding traction during hard acceleration, exceptional grip in the corners, strong braking, and outstanding high-speed stability. Also, these tires are supremely responsive and offer outstanding steering feel. That being said, if you mostly use your vehicle on the track or the drag strip, there are better options than max-performance tires.

That is especially true if you want to achieve the best possible quarter-mile times with your vehicle. These tires are an outstanding option for drivers that want to achieve outstanding quarter-mile times, but also want tires that will be dependable and useful on the street. Extreme-performance tires offer exceptional traction for hard acceleration, which makes them very useful on a drag strip.

Moreover, extreme-performance tires work exceptionally well on the street, even when it rains. For that reason, these tires offer the best combination of drag and street performance. Therefore, our list mostly consists of extreme-performance tires.

These tires offer the best traction for hard accelerations apart from specialized drag tires. With a set of streetable track tires, you will experience much less wheel spin when you hit the gas, which will improve the quarter-mile times.

That being said, these tires are only average for street driving. They are outstanding over a dry pavement, obviously, but not very useful for driving in heavy rain. Would the choice cost you performance? The transmission is a C4 from Nick Magana, and the rearend is 9-inch with 4. The car weighs 3, pounds without the driver. Dale's thinking was to use a pedestrian Comet to come a close as you can get to a real factory racer that you can still have fun with. It is an eighth-mile long and feet above sea level.

When we tested, the temperature was around 78 degrees. Round 1 To make this as scientifically accurate as possible, Dale performed the same burnout procedure and ran the car with each set of tires on the same night within an hour of one another. After the burnout, we made sure the tires were within 20 degrees of the track temperature.

We took the best run from each round for the result. The first run was on a pair of Rocket Strike 15x7-inch rear and 15x5 front wheels with Firestone bias-ply front tires and a pair of The rear wheel and tire combination weighed Results Round 2 For the second round, the sun had set and the track was getting slick from the ocean air. This is where the compliance of the bias-ply tires allowed the car to come out of spin off the line and recover the foot time.

In contrast, the radial was still able to mile per hour and, "felt so much more stable and predictable, very little side-to-side sloshing like the bias plies," according to Snoke.

Best of all, it's got a T56 manual trans, which we thought would be better for testing the hard-launching capabilities of the tires. Our first concern was that the size differential between the Mickeys and the Nittos, which on paper gave the former a measurable width advantage.

Also, the Nittos were brand new so we figured they'd need a little break-in at the strip before performing at an optimal level. For Tommy's first pass, he set the Camaro's two-step to 3, rpm and dumped the clutch.

Traction from the Mickey Thompsons bogged the engine, but the F-body still ran an For the next pass, Justin raised the launch rpm to 3, and this seemed just about perfect. The car tore out of the hole 1. After a cool down, Tommy raised the launch rpm to 4, rpm, but it caused a major spinning problem out of the hole 1. All runs were made with 22 psi in the tires, which worked great. When we switched to the Nittos, we had a bit of a learning curve and the first pass was a tire-spinning mess.

We started with 20 psi in the tires and a medium length burnout and got an Justin dropped the tire pressure for the next pass to 17 psi and the result was nearly identical. After a brief cool-down, we dropped the air pressure to 15 psi and the launch rpm to 3, Tommy also did a longer burnout. We were rewarded with an