by RichD » Mon Jul 31, 2017 8:18 am
Carrera cars come with rubber tires and those work well if you do not remove the car's traction magnets. Rubber tires often degrade with time, they can turn rock hard or fall apart in a year or two, but properly formulated rubber tires could possibly last for decades. Since most modern 1/32nd cars are intended to be run with traction magnets they will often not have enough grip when those are removed. The grip of rubber tires can be improved by treating them with 3in1 oil or the tire treatment that NSR sells. Even with tire treatment the cars are likely to be hard to drive unless you reduce the track voltage or install less powerful motors. Magnets often mask other problems that a car might have, including out of round wheels and tires and loose bearings.
Once your tires have turned hard I am not aware of any treatment that will restore their grip for more than a short time. If the tires on your cars have turned hard you might be able to buy stock replacements, but tires that have sat on the shelf for a while would be suspect.
If you are lucky there might be silicone or urethane tires made to fit your stock wheels, otherwise you would need to replace the wheels, tires, axle, gears and possibly bearings with aftermarket parts. Replacing all of those parts would be expensive.
Silicone and urethane tires do not degrade with time and they also wear more slowly than rubber tires. Modern silicone tires are especially tough, which makes them more difficult to sand, even if you use a machine. Silicone and urethane tires that are made for aftermarket wheels often come in different ODs. Aftermarket rubber tires are available, but those only fit aftermarket type wheels.
Someone has mentioned that different types of tires do not play well with each other. For a start there is no tire that I am aware of that works well on a very dirty track. Dust sticks to silicone tires and once they have become coated they will lose most of their grip. Dust does not stick to urethane tires, so they are more tolerant of a track that is not perfectly clean. Silicone tires can be quickly cleaned by rolling them on sticky tape, if your track is not absolutely filthy a few cycles of running the cars and cleaning the tires will eventually condition the track surface. Since dust does not stick to urethane tires rolling them on tape has no effect. If you also run silicone tires on your track those can leave a small amount of residue on the track which will coat urethane tires and will have to be washed off. Once again a few cycles of running the cars and washing the tires will usually condition the track. Rubber tires work their best if the track surface is coated with rubber, if you must clean your track do not use anything that will remove the rubber. It has been said that silicone tires will remove the rubber coating from your track, my club normally uses only silicone tires, so I have not been able to confirm that. We have run a number of proxy races where either rubber or urethane tires were mandated and we have run a class from time to time that used urethane tires.
If you intend to hold formal races on your track it might be best to stick with a single type of tire. If you must switch tires it is better to condition the track by running a lot of laps before the actual racing starts.