I was wondering if anyone heard of, or tried their own tire traction compound formula. I heard of this stock car racer around here using some bleach, kerosene, water and what-not to soften his tires in order to get more traction around the track.

Just thought i would post this and see if anyone out there has some info regarding this subject.

Mike

In the old days they used to use bleach, but I believe it has fallen out of favor for obvious reasons. I think they just use plain old water today. The object is to heat up the tires. In the slot cars days of long ago, we used to use wintergreen oil. It sort of made the tire dissolve slightly and made them real stsicky, plus it smelled real nice too.

Vince

Mike.... There are many different "wonder" formulas for softening race tires. I don't know what you want to soften them for, but circle track racers do it for immediate traction. It does wonders at the start of a race, before the tires get hot and stick on their own. We used to use softener on the tires for the go-karts my son and I raced. We checked the tires with durometers to see how soft they were. The stuff worked only for a short time, then they were hard again. It does drastically shorten the life of the tires, but then I was only concerned with them making it thru that race. It wasn't until after that race was over that I was concerned about those tires making it thru another race.

By the way, we didn't use it when I worked on a circle track car. It was illegal to use it on them.