For anyone who may be interested, I just confirmed with Rudy at Tire Rack that the UTGQ of all new shipments of Hankook RS3 tires will be 200 A A. Some people are already getting them as 200TW from them.

Scion FRS forum where people are getting them at 200 already:
Hankook Ventus RS3... I have a 200TW RS3? - Scion FR-S Forum | Subaru BRZ Forum | Toyota 86 GT 86 Forum | AS1 Forum - FT86CLUB

 

So did they actually change the tire or get it rerated at 200trw?

 

arbitrary rating are arbitrary.

 

From everything I am hearing it is just rerated.

 

lol I was going to say: 140 to 200, oh yeah that's so accurate, down to the last 1TW

They just wanna sell more to daily driver people, and bumped it up imo

 

Hankook RS3 - the new official tire of 24 Hours of Lemons!

 

If they keep production at current levels, then I expect them to be back ordered even more than now.

 

Curious

Just as curious as when BFG magically changed the Rival from 6.9 (IIRC) to 7.2/32 tread depth overnight.

C

 

There's something to be said here.

I don't know the first thing about the process of actually rating the treadwear on a tire, but for a specialty "street / race" tire such as the RS3, there is definitely a benefit to attaining a rating of 200 or higher, as this opens the door to certain racing classes which either prohibit the use of tires with less than a certain rating, or affix points / penalties to their use.

So, if a 200TW R-S3 really is as "good" as an otherwise equivalent 140TW tire, the R-S3 will tend to win more races simply because more people will be racing on it.

 

I think there are tire rule changes coming for the Auto-X guys.

 

From pdf downloaded on their site Welcome to Hankook

 

great now everyone will call them cheater tires and hate on the miatas even more.

I do agree with Brain though, TW has never really been standardized, so this doesn't come as too much of a surprise. Probably a move to stay in contention with new competition from other tire makers.

 

The change is in response to the SCCA contemplating changing ST tire minimum tread wear to 200. I seriously doubt any compound changes were made.


Hell, next thing you know the 195 toyo will be 200tw.

 

I still think the rival will be the tire to have at LeChump. That said, this is totally believable as a 200tw tire. Wear on mine is on pace, actually slower than the wear on my old star specs that were narrower and on a much heavier and over power car. The damn things dont seem to wear at all unless you're racing, they just dont get hot enough to soften up to anything softer than concrete.

 

Hello, SCCA? This is Hankook.

Get fucked.

 

That **** cray.

 

Sweet...less points for my class

 

If SCCA want to, they'll make a named exclusion for the RS-3.

But more likely, anyone who was running a lesser "200" TW tire will simply now switch to the RS-3.

It won't be classified as a "cheat" as long as every competitor is allowed the same "cheat". You might be faster on RS-3s, but now your rival is on RS-3s too...

 

Yah, will make autox street tire classes much faster and i bet they adjust PAX because of this.

 

What? 140TW has been legal in both ST and RT forever now. There is a proposed rule that stock will go to 200TW for 2015 and there is a current rule that RT will go there for 2014 if the stock rule proposal doesnt go through.