The returning CARS Tour roster is hoping the biggest continuing story of 2024 stays in the past.
Tires.
To that end, Hoosier has discontinued the ST2s for use in the CARS Tour and replaced them with the F45*s — which is actually a different compound than the F45s that were the standard in this discipline for years.
The new tire, which is pronounced ‘F45 Star,’ is still an unknown as teams are still working to optimize their setups over the course of the first handful of races. To wit, if there are any controversies in the early going, it would be prudent to give Hoosier, the Tour and teams the chance to make appropriate adjustments.
With reigning champion Brenden Queen now in the ARCA Racing Series, runner-up Connor Hall is the highest ranked driver from last season still on the tour but now runs with JR Motorsports after a season with Nelson Motorsports.
As a decade-long veteran of the discipline, Hall also has a good feel for each of these platforms feels and should feel like beneath him.
“First, I have a lot of optimism,” Hall said. “It will be interesting to see how they race but so far based on what I’ve experienced in the past, these seem to operate more like the F45. The ST2 was very awkward and its own beast per se.
“But these things seem to be doing all the things we love. You look over there and you seem a lot of marbles and the track is taking rubber, getting darker, all the positive things. They’re not out there melting down after five laps but they’re not bricks either. We have fall off.
“But the car still has to be balanced right, where the ST2 was more about pure speed and it hangs onto lap time all race.”
Hall said he didn’t want to get ahead of himself and that Saturday would be a first test of sorts but he liked what he saw in practice at New River All American Speedway on Friday.
Veteran Chad McCumbee, who knows the Hoosier Continental people very well from both his short track and road course endeavors, conceded that tire engineers are in a challenging spot with coming out with a tire that works for multiple Late Model discipline and all these various track types too.
“It’s such a tough spot because they are dealing with supply chain issues from the manufacturers they use,” McCumbee said. “I don’t envy their position. I believe they’re working hard and have worked hard to alleviate some of the issues they had last year.
“I don’t know that I have an answer for what they should do different but I am confident they have put everything they have into it and what I felt yesterday was a good product. Does that remain to be seen? We’ll find out. If there is some kind of issue, we’re all in the same boat to figure out a solution together.
And that’s what happened last year.
The first season under ST2s on both the left and right sides was plagued with construction consistency issues. Teams, who are not allowed to select tires, would frequently receive tires from various production date codes with each responding wildly differently.
Beyond the repeatability of the tires, it was also a grippy tire that didn’t fall off a great deal over the course of a long green flag run and occasionally even gained speed from heat cycle to heat cycle. Races became qualifying laps and track position was so important that races devolved into bumper car affairs.
It was wildly entertaining unless you were in the business of buying and competing on them. Eventually, the teams and series got Hoosier to move off the ST2s and back on leftover F45s that were made prior to the season.
Three-time CARS Tour champion Bobby McCarty was a frequent critic of the ST2s and was complimentary of what he has experienced at New River.
“These don’t as much sidewall flexing but it has the grip of the old 45s,” McCarty said. “Our pace is what the pole time was last year. But I like everything about it so far. The only question I have is going this far on a softer compound and stiffer sidewall, what is that going to do on a long run?
“Because, when you don’t have that sidewall flex, it starts peeling the surface patch off it. So that’s a question I have, but so far, I like them.”
Andrew Grady doesn’t quite know what to make of them yet.
“These tires are weird,” Grady said. “A lot of us have been talking all day about it and it’s not a bad thing but it’s just different than what we’ve had.”
Grady kind of wishes the field was granted a ‘dead lap’ that doesn’t count before his qualifying laps on Saturday. He’s also the first driver to head out in time trials.
“I think us not knowing anything about these tires is going to be hard without a dead lap,” he said. “We need to get some heat in them. But we’re all in the same boat. But I am going to lead us off tomorrow and go out there and be a test monkey.”
Where Hall thought these tires felt like the 45s, Grady thought they drove like the ST2.
“They fall off here is usually drastic,” Grady said. “You usually slow down quickly but we haven’t slowed down much today at all. I got faster with 45 laps on them. I don’t know what the racing is going to be like tomorrow night. If there’s no fall off, it’s going to be a hell of a show.”
And then there was Landen Lewis of Kevin Harvick Inc., who said he felt no difference from the F45 to the F45*.
“We’ve done it back to back,” Lewis said. “We went to South Boston a couple weeks ago and it put the 45s and 45*s on back-to-back but I didn’t see much of a difference.”
It’s worth noting that then he’s turning laps on the mixed rubber caked into the track then too.
“There’s a lot of talk about the difference and I don’t feel there is right now,” he added. “We also go to a lot of different tracks and I’m sure there will be some differences but right now they are consistent from set to set and we haven’t had any problems like last year.
“Knock on wood that everything goes good.”
Everyone is knocking hard to that.
