ASM S2000 Snags Tsukuba Circuit Top Radial Street Tire Time
Driver Hiroki Kato is the Tsukuba master, on race tires or street tires.
ASM should already be well-known to our S2KI members, being one of the top champs in Japan’s Maximum Challenge time attack series. Since Maximum Challenge has a few classes and categories, it seems ASM would try their hand at getting the top step in as many categories as possible. In this video, they go for the radial street tire top time.
ASM’s build for this hot lap include 295/30-18 Advan A052 street tires, an engine output of nearly 325 horsepower, and a weight of about 2270 lbs. Add on some pretty extreme aero and you can see why this is an S2000 ready to mop up the competition.
Every driver prefers their car to be set up differently, and it appears Hiroki Kato likes his cars set up neutral, with just a tiny bit of looseness on corner exit. In fact, the whole lap is so clean and tidy that Kato makes it look like relatively easy work. As they say, clean is fast. And fast around Tsukuba is any time under 60 seconds. With no traffic to contend with, the conditions were ideal for a hot lap.
Now, we had previously reported on Kato and the ASM S2000 getting the fastest NA S2000 record at Tsukuba Circuit, but that was with sticky race tires, and a time of 57.051. How much slower are street compound Advan A052’s? Well, not much. With a time set of 57.935, Kato adds fastest street radial to this S2000’s pedigree. Understandably the loss of time would be in the corners, but with how well planted this car seems, perhaps Kato left a few tenths of a second on the table. Or, it might just be a tire that has a very narrow slip angle range.
Congrats to ASM and Kato for another top time!
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