Dirt track tire prep

In the world of dirt track racing we do everything diffrent. For instance we take a perfectly good set of brand new tires an grind, groove, sipe, and needle them.
1 grinding- we do this to take the slippery outer coat off the tire. So we take a variable speed grinder wit around a 30 grit sandpaper disk on it and grind the whole thing.
2 groving. We take a heated grooving iron and cut grooves into the tread in a design that helps us achive forward and lateral grip or as we call it, side bite. The grooves help dig into the track when it is moist and tacky. Groves are not ussually used on dry slick tracks
Here is a normal tire

Here is one that is cross groved to give forward traction

3 sipes- sipes are when we take a device that has a set of razor blades and you cut accross, around, or both. This allows the tire to keep from glazing over by having the individual tread blocks moving and rubbing togeather. Here are some examples


4 needling- we have a roller with hundreds of needles that we roll over the tire. This helps the tire get up to temp. It also softens the tires. A new tire durometer at around 75 and after needling it will durometer around 50.

People ussually buy machines for this and they are between $1200 and $3000. We are on a budget and are relitively smart so we made one out of an old treadmill

Here is a video we did for a contest to win a high dollar machine. Hope you enjoyed this.