Tire rotation

[Las Palmas]

Do must of the RS6 owners on this forum rotate there tires.Thanks for the info.

[Aronis]

Absolutely. Front to back, not side to side.
I rotate 1/2 way through the summer and winter and keep track of which ones were on the front or back at the end of the season so as to make sure to put them on properly.
This evens out the wear and allows you to get max milage out of a set of four. If you don't the fronts will wear down much faster.

This is generaly true for any car with high performance tires. Cheaper tires which are longer last also....usually out last the rest of the car....LOL...

Mike

[Radiation Joe]

My car wears the rears at about twice the rate of the fronts. If I didn't rotate my tires, the rears would wear out at about 15k miles and the fronts at 30k.
Joe

[Aronis]

that's very strange.

[SpinEcho]

Bizarre! Never heard of the rears wearing faster on an RS6 - or any recent Audi for that matter...

[rubyblack]

Yep very bizarre...could be unique really!!! :vhmmm:

[Leadfoot]

As someone who has gone through 3 sets of tyres in just over two years, I possibly have more experience than most on this matter and never have I had or heard of an Audi with Quattro, no matter which model wear the rear tyres first and by such a margin. On all of my sets the fronts have only done less miles by on more than 1000~1500 miles (depending on make) and the left slightly worse than the right, mainly because of the road camber we have over here, round-abouts and the fact we drive on the left side of the road.

To say that your (Radiation Joe) case is Bizarre is under selling it. :vhmmm: Is your car any slower than other RS6s? If so then you have been driving with the handbrake on all this time.:doh:

Sorry mate, couldn't resist it.:thumb:
P.S. Do not buy Continentals as they are the worse wearing tyre imaginable.

[paulhiggs]

Perhaps the rear isout of alignment and this is causing excessive/abnormal wear..

Some toe (in or out) would create a scrubbing effect,
Camber would wear inside or outside differently
Under/over inflation will also reduce the tread life

Finally, larger rear sizes (width/height) could cause some of it...

[Radiation Joe]

I wonder if there is something screwy with my center diff?

OK, Here's my story.

I normally drive like an old lady, but when it's time for speed I don't pull any punches. I have a BMW racecar and an e46 M3 that get beat pretty hard. The Audi is the daily driver. So I didn't think driving style had anything to do with it. Funny, I had two other 1.8 B4s and neither wore the fronts excessively fast, either. One was the stock sport suspension and the other was a Bilstein/H&R setup. Maybe driving style does have something to do with it? I was pretty surprised to see the rears wearing fast on this car, though. I don't even wear the rears fast on the BMW and it's supposed to wear the rears twice as fast as the fronts.

I've driven the car across country twice this year and spend the vast majority of other time on the highway. A high percentage of the cross country driving has been at triple digit speeds. I had the tires rotated on the last trip out from California when I noticed the rears were wearing about twice as fast as the fronts. 5 thousand miles prior to this I had the car in for the 55k service. At that time they may have rotated the tires without my knowledge.

The tires are Continental Contiextremecontacts with 20k miles on them. I could get another 10k miles if I put them back on after winter, but expect to replace them with Michelin PS2s at that time. So it doesn't look like the rears are wearing fast, only that the fronts are wearing slower.

I don't know what Leady thinks is bad mileage, but to me, anything over 20k miles on a car like this is pretty good. I also have run Contisportcontact2s on my BMW with outstanding results. Quiet, good grip and wear like iron (again over 20k miles). I will keep the parking brake status in the forefront when driving from now on, though. :lovl: :thumb: I still prefer Michelins.

One other thing. I ran the rears about 5 psi lower than the fronts for the majority of the life of those tires (41f 36r) Remember there was a thread a while back either on this forum or Audiworld where I argued that the weight distribution justified the difference in pressure. It's counterintuitive that pressure would be the cause. Lower pressure in the rear will reduce the rolling diameter. This will tend to cause the center diff to shift bias to the front (to the slower turning wheels). Right?

Ughh. I dunno. I'm just going to drive the thing and stop thinking about this stuff. :trash:

[Leadfoot]

I don't know what Leady thinks is bad mileage, but to me, anything over 20k miles on a car like this is pretty good. I also have run Contisportcontact2s on my BMW with outstanding results. Quiet, good grip and wear like iron (again over 20k miles). I will keep the parking brake status in the forefront when driving from now on, though. :lovl: :thumb: I still prefer Michelins.


Well done for getting 20K out of your Contis. You must drive the car a lot on the motorways or very gingerly as I can only get just about 7K out of mine, though in the UK you must change your tyres at the 3mm mark to stay legal. Just to show how even the wear was front to rear was FL 2mm, FR 2.3mm, RL 2.6mm and RR 3mm. This is the result you should be getting as like my car the quattro system is 50/50% and not like the new ones which are 40/60%.

The Beemer will get twice the mileage out of the fronts compared to the rears.

[papadoc]

your posts prompted me to look at the wear on my PS2s. I had pretty even wear on the original Dunlops, and this set is on about 18K miles. I had not rotated them to date, based solely on noting the wear on the tires. Well, as I measured them today, the rears do have slightly more wear than the front tires, and all 4 have even wear. I keep the pressures even on all 4. I drive highways most of the time, no track time, and while I do drive aggressively at times (why else would we have this car?) most of the driving is smooth freeway time and little in the way of aggressive cornering. So, I would guess that the wear is highly dependent on how and where you drive.

[s42ski]

Radiation Joe, you are not the only "odd ball" out there - my rears have also wore out faster and I have them rotated every 5000 miles. I mentioned this to the dealer as "odd" and he stated it was "normal".....?

I have the Dunlop 9000 noise machines on the car now and am waiting to wear them out before I switch to 19" PSII's on SSR wheels ( waiting to be installed in the garage).

[Leadfoot]

Is this any American thing, maybe something to do with the type of suspension set-up that is used there instead of the European one. I have asked the tyre dealers which does a lot of Audi work, just out of interest and was told that my case was typical where the wear was pretty much equal all round.

For Joe's to not be the single case of this leads me to think yes there is a difference between the two set-ups.

[Rupert]

Get your alignment checked too, too much toe-out or toe-in on the rears will cause them to wear at a faster rate even if all your driving is in a straight line.

[Radiation Joe]

Is this any American thing, maybe something to do with the type of suspension set-up that is used there instead of the European one. I have asked the tyre dealers which does a lot of Audi work, just out of interest and was told that my case was typical where the wear was pretty much equal all round.

For Joe's to not be the single case of this leads me to think yes there is a difference between the two set-ups.


I'm going to get 25k miles out of a set of Contis which Leady says wear out in less than 10k on his car. I just noted that my rears are wearing faster than my fronts. I could just as well have said that my fronts are wearing half as fast as my rears.

I'm thinking that my front alignment may have less toe-in than normal and that may be contributing to better wear in front.

Anyway, lets go out and drive them and piss on the tires.....:cheers:

[Leadfoot]

Joe,

I do approx 12K per year and of that only 2K would be motorway/highway. But I do drive my car pretty hard especially around corners, plus I like to take ESP off and slid the car around a bit so this might explain why I get bad mileage out of my tyres, but this doesn't explain why some of you are get re-regular wear. Over here we have quite a camber on the road and our set-up might be different to other countries.

If you think about it, quattro on the older systems run 50/50 in normal use and only move it's power under adverse conditions, but we all know that A4/6s understeer when really pushed so by right the fronts should wear first because of the shrubbing effect.