What about those tires?
Before the alphabet soup escapes my memory forever, we ran the One Lap on a set of 195/55-15 Dunlop Direzza Z1 Star Spec tires from The Tire Rack. They were awesome! I think they maybe could have been a little better in the wet, but otherwise, I had no complaints about them at all... and they were good for .997 G's, had good steering response and no wear issues. What more could I ask for?
Here's a shot of the front tire after driving one autocross and the 1200 mile trip up to South Bend. Amazingly, even with nearly 3 degrees of negative camber, they showed no appreciable wear at this point. The tire has a brilliant stepped section on the outer groove that would make any uneven wear stand out.
This is what we found while checking tire pressures on the last day of the One Lap before driving the dry skidpad event. D'oh! Removing it was not an option. If it was worse, we probably could have gotten them to allow us to get it fixed and run out of order. But, running it as it is just seemed like the "spirit of the event" thing to do. And so we did. Inflated it to 30psi and ran .997 G's on it!
After running the skidpad and getting the tire fixed (thanks Tire Rack crew!), we rotated the tires. Not so much due to wear issues, but because Jeff's spin at No Problem flat-spotted the front tires and I wasn't looking forward to driving home that way! So, I took a couple photos while the tires were off of the car.
The rear tires showed almost no wear, and maybe half a mm more wear on the inside edge. The front tires are 1/2 to 2/3 worn, but the wear is surprisingly even. Again... with almost 3 degrees of camber, I expected some inside tire wear. I guess all of the track miles balanced it out.
Maintenance-wise, there's nothing else to report. The synthetic oil with 7,000 miles on it still looks new. Not a drop of oil was used on the trip. Front brake pads are less than half worn. The suspension all stayed tight. The car was simply flawless!
