Photography by Tom Suddard
A week of track days and more than 3000 transit miles. And you can’t change tires–unless, of course, you legitimately get a flat. Which we did.
Unlike NASCAR or IMSA, though, you can’t just duck into the pits for a quick change. This was going to upset our schedule.
Welcome to day 6 of the Tire Rack One Lap of America Presented by Grassroots Motorsports, where team GRM is running a swapped Honda CRX against some of today’s top performance cars–things like Tesla Plaids, turbo Porsches and a bunch of Corvettes.
We’ve been easily leading our Economy class and sitting just outside of the top-10 against nearly 80 entrants.
We’ve faced some issues, too, notably accelerated wear with our Yokohama Advan A052 tires, a model known for speed over longevity. We knew that going in, though, and planned to rotate our fronts to the backs at the halfway point–which, thanks to our staggered wheels, requires mounting and dismounting the tires.
We swapped tires as planned, moving our mostly unworn Yokohamas to the front. We should be set for the rest of the week, right?
And then we got a flat. Right-front, too, meaning one of our good Yokohamas. The culprit: a nail. The sidewall got chewed up while getting the car to a safe spot, so patching the tire was out of the equation.
We had a spare A052 in the car–already mounted–but it was on a 15x8-inch wheel, one of our rears.
To get the car ready for its next track session, we’d have to swap tires–again–so the replacement landed on one of our 15x9-inch front wheels. Today’s sessions would take place at Pittsburgh International Race Complex, and the trackside shop’s crew graciously swapped tires for us.
Now we don’t have a spare tire–at all–meaning we’re transiting without a safety net. It’s only about a 6-hour drive to the next stop.
The tire issues also ate up our transit time, meaning just four hours of sleep last night. During One Lap, you can race, you can sleep, or you can do everything else.
The latest results show us sitting in 13th overall as we finished 15th in today’s wet sessions at Pitt Race.
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