Early on in driving in NASA HPDE, it is important to start on street tires so you get used to sliding the car, feeling it, and of course, correcting it. By the time you get up to HPDE3 and HPDE4, it’s probably time to start thinking about stickier rubber.
If you cannot commit to a truck and trailer to tow your car to the track, there are other ways to bring your track tires with you and still be able to drive to and from on your street tires. Call it a win-win.
The four most viable ways to schlep your wheels and tires to the track are as follows:
- In your trunk and back seat.
- Roof- or body-mounted rack.
- Hitch-mounted carrier.
- Lightweight utility trailer
Unless you can transport and swap tires at the track, you are either going to wear out your track tires on the street or tear up your street tires on the track. These ideas are great not only for HPDE, but also for autocross and Time Trial.
There are pluses and minuses to each of them, of course, but once you recoup the costs of building or buying whatever transport method you choose, they all will end up saving you money on tires over the long run. One option doesn’t cost anything. The rest of these ideas are probably $1,000 or less. Not terrible.
“The first couple of autocrosses you go to, it’s just you and maybe a buddy. And if you’re fortunate enough, you have an air tank to be able to raise or lower your air pressure and adjust it as the day goes along. Or you just ‘run what you brung’ and go home,” said former NASA Southeast Spec Z series leader John Evans. “And when you go home and you see all your tires are feathered completely off the front or back, and you look at the and you say, ‘Gee, that hurt.’”
With many of these tire-transport ideas, there likely will be some measure of custom work, fabrication and making the idea work for the car you have. Whether it’s adapting trailer hitches or trimming your fascia or your car’s bumper or something, you might have to get creative at some point. Some of the more popular cars, like the Mazda Miata, have ready-made solutions you can buy, but not all cars enjoy that kind of support from the aftermarket.
Packing Them Inside The Car
Packing your track tires inside your car is your cheapest option, but it’s also probably one of the least appealing because it can be a challenge to get everything in there. It’s also the most likely to get the inside of your car dirty.
Track wheels get filthy with brake dust. Track tires will always have gravel and rubber “marbles” stuck to them when you pull back into the paddock to change back to your street tires. The drawback is that it’s going to have a negative effect on your interior over time. It’s one thing if you are driving to the track in a 20-year-old E46 sedan with a gutted interior, and quite another if you have a nice new Toyota GR86.
Body-Mounted Rack
Lots of cars manufactured within the last 25 years have fixtures for roof racks, and if you have been going to the track for almost any amount of time, you likely have seen NASA drivers bring wheels to the track on a roof rack. Depending on the car, there are limitations to how much weight you can carry on the roof, so check the owner’s manual or check with the manufacturer before going that route.
Depending on the car, there are other methods to carry track wheels. On Miatas, for example, you can simply lash them to the back of the roll bar. There are some companies that make racks that align with the trunk seams and attach to the car at the “Frankenstein” bolts just forward of the deck lid. The drawback to those options is that you can’t see anything behind you in the inside rearview mirror.
Hitch-Mounted Carrier
You often see hitch-mounted cargo racks on pickups and SUVs. They are handy for carrying everything from camping gear to motorcycles, but they can be adapted to track cars to carry spare wheels. Whether you need to do a lot of adaptation depends on the car and whether there is an aftermarket hitch made for it.
“The hard part was getting a trailer hitch for any of the vehicles I had, because obviously a Honda S2000 or a 350Z, they’re not real popular tow vehicles,” Evans said. “So I had to find a trailer hitch and then modify it so I could put it behind the car. Whether it be the S2000 or 350Z, you had to cut into the rear valance because the car’s so low. Obviously you’ve got to really work on that. So that was a pretty good feat of engineering.”
Again, weight can be a factor. Hanging a lot of weight off the back bumper of an S2000 is a different from that of a Camaro or a Mustang. It also can be detrimental to track-oriented dampers, which were not designed for heavy loads. Check the owner’s manual or other resources about how much you can carry.
Tire Trailer
The option that is probably most widely applicable is the tire trailer. It is effective and inexpensive, but it must be done correctly. The kind of trailer you buy is as important as how you load it. As with all trailers, 60 percent of the load most be located forward of the axle. Why? Too much weight on the rear of the trailer can lead to instability in the form of trailer sway.
Evans loaded his wheels in the front, the boxes that contained tools and jacks and jack stands over the axle and put the fuel cans in the rear. He left the fuel cans empty until he got close to the track, then filled them up for the quick final leg of the trip, and again left them empty for the ride home.
“If you’re going to swap tires, you need some jack stands and a jack and some tools. And so one thing led to another, and then that little package came together and worked famously,” Evans said.
One neat little trick that Evans employed on his trailer was to put bicycle flags on the rear corners of the trailer so other cars could see it better while he was towing it. Those flags also made it somewhat easier for him to back up the trailer if he had to. If you don’t already know, small trailers are far more difficult to back up than large trailers.
The trailer was so conveniently sized that Evans used to keep it under the deck behind his house. That means no storage lot fees and no meddlesome neighbors to darken your door citing HOA bylaws.
“With a little trailer like that, it was no problem,” Evans said. “Literally, I guess you could have it in an apartment if you had a little storage space in the apartment complex, you could stash it away almost. And they’re just super convenient, cheap, and it worked great.”
