Volante Tyre Review

7 December 2018

Volante has a good range of tyres as shown above.

Tested for Asphalt on hot track:

Rear - Double Pink (VF1-HARSS VOLANTE F1 Rear Rubber Slick Tires Asphalt Hyper Soft Compound Preglued)
Front - Green (VF1-FH VOLANTE F1 Front Rubber Slick Tires Asphalt Medium Soft Compound Preglued)

Summary

The Volante double pink rears provided plenty of grip at the track temperatures tested. The Green fronts provided adequate steering. Overall I was impressed with the Volante tyres and have added them to our Tyres page for asphalt. I've run Volante's on carpet previously with success. Tyres were tested back to back with new Ride GR rears and used Ride XR fronts (because I didn't have any GR fronts) and the Volante's were the equal of the Rides in grip.

Pros

Plenty of rear-end grip.
No ungluing of tyres even after a lot of sliding in corners (by entering a tight corner too quickly).
Good wear.

Cons

The holes for the front bearings are exceedingly tight and getting the bearings in and out was a pain.
The rear wheels have insufficient clearance for the wheel nut tool (and I was using the Tamiya four-way spanner which doesn't require a lot of space. My slightly thicker nut driver wouldn't fit at all). Getting the spanner on the wheel-nut is not as straightforward as it should be when the wheels are new. After a few uses, the problem disappears as turning the spanner appears to rub away the plastic enough to free things up.

Other Comments

These are low profile tyres, so they don't look like the current full-scale F1 tyres. Of course, if you like low profile tyres then this is great :)
The tyre diameter is slightly smaller than Ride or Pit Shimizu tyres and therefore the ride height needs adjusting if changing from one of these tyres to Volante's.
Width and weight of Volante tyres is similar to the Ride tyres. However, the Volante fronts have more of a curved shape from the tyre surface to the wheel and therefore slightly less tyre surface area. This did not appear to impact on traction and the Volante and Ride tyres tested had similar grip.
The Green fronts are the softest front compound that Volante make but I would have liked something slightly softer to generate more steering to suit my driving style. However, from past experience I prefer grippier front tyres than most people and these tyres would probably suit most drivers with an understeering car. This understeer can be reduced by increasing tyre additive application. Normally I don't use additive on the fronts, only the rears. However, with these tyres I applied additive to 1/2 of the inside of each front tyre and used tyre warmers for a minimum of 15 minutes on 60C (air temp was about 16C). This worked very well.

Track Temperature

Testing took place on 3 different days and track temperatures ranged from 28C to 49C. The majority of testing took place between 28-32C.

Race Meeting

2018 Pan Car Challenge. One set of tyres was used for 3 practice runs, 3 Qualifiers and 3 Finals. There was a low number of entries in F1 but these tyres assisted me to TQ and win.

volante car