Anyone have any experience of this? Is it worth it, or is it perfectionism-too-far? I'm in Europe where 100mph+ running for hours on end is common, and the tires do get warm. Anyone used nitrogen, even in race cars? Anyone know of a source of nitrogen - high perf tire shops maybe?. The cut/past below gives more background. It's from UK so spelling is "tyres" :-)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/science...ingtyres.shtml
"Nitrogen is a very unreactive gas. If you fill a tyre with dry nitrogen gas, it is possible to predict how much it will expand as the tyre heats up from friction with the road. Air on the other hand is an unpredictable beast. While its composition is always the same, consisting of 76% nitrogen and about 20% oxygen, the amount of water in it can change from minute to minute and this water makes the expansion of air very unpredictable.
The height of a racing tyre is critical to a couple of millimetres. If the pressure in a tyre is too high the car will be difficult to steer and if it is too low the car may scrape the track, so race engineers need to know exactly how much the gas in a tyre will expand during a race. In the extreme situation of a crash the fact that nitrogen expands less than oxygen when heated means there is less chance of the tyre exploding during a fire. Tyres can explode with the force of a dynamite detonation, which increases the risk already faced by rescue crews.
This is the high performance end of the spectrum, but nitrogen is also used in the tyres of more every day vehicles. Long distance lorries often use it as water in air oxidises the rubber in tyres causing them to corrode. Over longer periods gas also diffuses out of tiny pores in rubber tyres. As a nitrogen molecule is larger than an oxygen molecule it leaks out of tyres three times slower than air, which maintains tyre pressure and therefore tread wear. All in all, using nitrogen in tyres can more than double their lifespan, although for the flimsy racing tyre which needs changing several times in a race nothings going to make that much difference."
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