Fair enough. Just remember that his is a "DOT tire", too...
And the NT-01 has been around a REALLY long time...
this article from 2005 came out when this tire was relatively new. That is 17 years ago. Even back then there were DOT tires that could put the hurt on the NT-01, but not many. Since then....
I remember entering autocross and Time Trials in that era, and there
were some folks setting class records in NASA TT on the NT-01, but even with the Hoosier R7 penalized heavily these old records fell quickly when the classes got even remotely competitive. I haven't seen an even regional TT win on an NT-01 since 2006 or 2007... After that period we even set some TTA records on 180TW Yokohama AD07 tires (the
EVO X above) against people on NT-01s, and didn't get any additional handicap over the Nittos. Those AD07s were considerably slower than even the recent Bridgestone RE-71R or the current Yokohama A052 "200" TW tires.
In the 2018-2019 seasons we sponsored a series of trophies/classes to try to bring the modern 200 TW tires into NASA Time Trial. This was done in the Texas NASA region, which is fairly big region and tends to bring home some Nationals wins.
We had about 60 different cars over 2 seasons compete in these "street tire" classes and a LOT of good data was gathered. I ran my 2018 GT in the class, with 200TW tires on Saturday (Re-71R) competitions and Hoosier R7/A7 tires on Sundays, to get some good Street Tire vs Hoosier comparisons over the same weekend.
Above is a page from the 2022 rulebook for NASA ST / TT classes. Using this street tire vs Hoosier data plus a lot more tire testing, NASA National office decided to re-vamp their modifiers for NASA ST & TT classing, and they lumped the various "non-Hoosier" tires into two new
tire handicap categories, shown above. I am bringing this home, trust me!
The
Faster "200" treadwear tires are given a +1.0 handicap bonus in their power-to-weight ratios over a Hoosier R7, which is a healthy but accurate bump. The
Slower "200" TW tires - and all of the 100TW Nittos and Toyos - were lumped into a category with an even bigger handicap bonus of +1.6 - fully 60% more handicap. That means that their data showed that the NT-01/R1R/R888R/R888/RA-1/RR were in the slowest category of tires they bother to handicap. Lumped in the same category as the
Michelin Pilot Sport 4S, which is a 300 TW true street tire that OEMs use a lot. Sadly, the NT-01 wears far worse than most in that list, but hey, that's why I am not a Nitto fan.
Long story short - a racing organization that has tens of thousands of members (NASA), who has done many hundreds if not thousands of hours of competition tire testing, now lumps the NT-01 into the
absolute slowest category of tires rated for use on track. Because.... well, the data shows that they are pretty dang slow. Again, this is a tire that came out in 2004-2005. This is not "HPDE fun rated", or even
price:wear or
price:grip rated (what I tried to quantify), but just SLOW against the clock rated. This isn't just Terry's opinion, its now the rules in the largest Time Trial organization on the planet - from a group that values testing and data above all else.
Cheers,