I have yet to find a tire that doesn’t perform better new than after a few heat cycles. Every tire we have ever run, and we have run B’stones, MG, Maxxis, Yokahama, Dunlop, there always seem to be one or two laps in them in their first heat cycle that’s .3 ot .5 faster than subsquent laps. What this means is that for qualifying, it’s much better to have new tires than old.
Bottom line, I really don’t care how long the tire lasts. It’s a moot point. If you want to qualify up front, you WILL go out on new tires. The MG is a fine tire. I have a whole pile of them that could easily get one or two more races out of them. But there no way we will use them for anything but practice. The simple reason is this, we want to qualify on the front row if not pole. The only way you will be able to do that is with new tires.
It doesn’t matter what tire you pick, hard, soft, medium, at every race, if you want the front row, you will be on new tires. Changing tire brands will have minimal impact on overall tire costs.
In NorCal, they use hard tires which in theory last all year. Yet at every race, the front runners are on new tires. The reason is simple, new tires are faster than old tires.
While many bad mouth the Mojo tires, they actually are pretty good. At the Rotax Grands, most of the teams had figured them out. The racers were allowed only one set of tires for the event. And they put alot of laps on them with so many heat races, qualifying, LCQ’s and such. The tires had plenty of life in them after all that. But, they, like all tires have one or two very fast laps in them before they settle down. Could you get two or three race days in, sure you can. But if you want to run up front, you need new tiress for qualifying.