Opens have surplus HP that can break the tires loose at any moment....they almost always run less stagger than stock class karts.
Cutting the tires isn't for the purpose of sizing -- you size tires by mounting them and stretching or shrinking them with heat/cold.
Take the valve core out of your left rear and place the tire in the sun until it is hot. The put it in the freezer for a bit. That'll shrink it some. Repeat if necessary to get desired stagger you want.
Thank you for the feedback. I read in an older thread that you were cutting tires for a customer at for Ben Hur at a specified OD in order to have proper stagger at Hur. This was where I got the comment from. Maybe not an ideal situation.
So yesterday we went back to Rockport. I spent Thursday, Friday and Saturday morning preparing tires. Mostly adjusting tires OD in order to have some variation once we got to Rockport. (1/10th mile with 50’ Radius) basically giving the kart a solid baseline setup from multiple TritonJr teams. (The setups were all similar)
I used high pressure, sunshine, zero pressure and freezers to my stagger set.
last night it was warm, wet and HUMID.
Practice our stagger was
Front 1.5”
Rear 1.31 ( 1 5/16)
I also had sets for the rear set at
1.25” & 1.43”. Plan was to use practice as a baseline and adjust.
with no prep on the tires we were better than we’ve ever been there. Plan was to use the same set for the heat race. While waiting I put 13 pounds in the right side and emptied the left side. As we staged I adjusted the tire pressure to race psi. Started outside 2nd row and by turn one was in 2nd place and running strong. First three laps running with the kid that won the previous week. Midway through the heat you could see the kart tightening up. So much that we hit the wall exiting T2 and spinning. However, still ran 2nd place and pulled away from the other karts.
Immediately washed the tires and measured stagger.
finished the race with 1.0” of stagger. Before the feature all three sets of tires had returned to a size that put us at a stagger disadvantage. I ended up moving my FR tire to the back.
ran the feature with
Front 1.25”
Rear 1.125”
..... feature was a blood bath of ten karts. Ran up to 3rd and was involved in 4 cautions.
How do I grow and shrink tires and get the sizes to stick? Yes