Well, the two that came off the front were. The reason for that was they were on the rears back when I was still driving the Bimmer to work on a daily basis. They wouldn’t last this long, if it wasn’t for the electronic traction control. Winter treads are soft and don’t last anyway, but those tires only had about 10k miles on them! The way it’s setup and how I drive it (mildly) is very hard on the tires.
The tire wear generator appears to be dialed in to the Öhlins coilover settings now. I thought “damn, is this thing that far out of alignment?” -when I took the first one off. It’s still tracking perfectly, feels tight and solid, like the BMW it is. Turns out they all wore on the inside, just more so in front. The suspension setup lowers it about a half inch, with some pretty aggressive negative camber.
So I’m not really pushing it, as far as the suspension goes – the extent to which I haven’t found. The car is scary fast, with limits I’m obviously not approaching on a regular basis, judging from just the tire wear. Mashing the skinny pedal at the dragstrip is something anyone with even the slightest nerve connection to their right foot can do, but safely generating lateral g-forces on public streets can be pretty dangerous and is generally frowned upon.
They weren’t going anywhere except the tire pile after I put them on last fall, and they’re runflats, so what the hell. New daily driver, with the Bimmer relegated to weekend road course duty? It’s beat up enough now after somebody learned parking in it a couple years ago, swappin’ paint at the track is starting to sound like a great idea. Hmmmmm…