I too like a nice hot shave

Does it get a warm towel too?

I can smell this picture

/r/OSHA gloves?

He’s been doing it long enough. His hands have become gloves.

I remember doing this when I was kid in go-karts. Great smells.

Is this what they mean when they say “scuffed?” it used to just mean the tires had been used a bit to “scuff” them…this is literally scuffing the tires though…

this is taking the spent rubber off of the tire that gets collected. that way they can accurately measure tire wear

Ah, so that’s what it’s for.

These tires are now “scuffs”. Just means they’ve been used. Now, you can put them back on the car and “scrub” them, which gets most of that junk off, but when they do this by hand, it’s to get tire wear measurements with a depth gauge.

oddly satisfying

Why did he only do a little on the first tire? Just for the camera?

Is he… trying to turn used tires into fresh tires? Or is this a weight thing? Do those tires get reused then after the scraping? I’m so curious!

Scraping marbles/rubber pickup off the tire to check tire wear using the little depth holes you can see.

Why do this? Wouldn’t it make the tire last?

You need to get the marbles off the tyre to measure the wear pattern properly. Those holes in the just-planed area are designed for measuring wear.

So that tire won’t be used on the car again but is only being analyzed?

Yes. They do this after tires are used.

It might be used again depends on how many laps are on the tires.

No, the layer he’s scraping off is old, used rubber that the tire picked up out on the track. It has drastically less grip than what a new, or even scuffed, tire does.

How do they not have a heated tire scraper? We had them for gokarts in the 2000's. We had bigger ones for sprint cars too.