What a glorious day for the first day in March and this is our first day out to race with the new Bridgestone RE-11 tires. In case you haven't been paying attention, the RE-11 replaces the old RE-01R from 2008 and is now officially available.
Given that we were scheduled to run in the afternoon and with the delays that had taken place, both of us spent a lot of time just standing around, like this:
The fifth run group didn't start running until around 3:45PM. Rather late for normal running with a sixth group still to go before the sun sets.
Today, we drove the 205/50/15. It was a good course for this tire. Many fast sections, some transitions and only 3 slow turnarounds. If you run a Civic like ours, you will notice that the car works harder coming out of the low speed turnarounds - not really any different than the Toyo drivers that may choose to run the 225.
205 vs 195 RE-11On this grippy asphalt surface, this tire feels like it has almost R compound levels of grip - something that I know I'm not used to being in a street tire class and I will have to make a conscious effort to recalibrate my butt - and my nerve for higher corner entry speeds.
The Civic has been suffering from some braking problems lately (we seized a caliper last week and it sent me on a little loop de loo). However, the tire squeels louder than the RE-01R did (another area to recalibrate), but it does slow down better than the old tire. It just sounds like it doesn't.
The course had a big right handed sweeper that was wide and I'd slow down to turn in and find out that I had slowed down too much. I'm beginning to think that I should have just attacked the turn without hitting the brakes. If I had just tried it... Being familiar with this site, both of us agree that there is no way we would have been able to take this turn at the same speed on the RE-01R.
Being in a two driver car, we were concerned about heat (today was in the mid-70's and sunny). The RE-01R heated up and started to get greasy very quickly. This new tire is so much better in this aspect. It will heat up during the run, but it will also have cooled off significantly by the time the next driver was up to drive. This is a huge improvement from the RE-01R. We didn't start watering until the end of the 2nd runs for both drivers.
The tire is also showing signs of comparable durability to the RE-01R. Time will tell just how good these tires are as we get more seat time on these tires. Given what we have just seen, my expectation is very high and this tire is definitely better than the outgoing tire.
As for us, we need to work on going faster.
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