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What’s 16 seconds? In racing terms, it’s an eternity. So when Porsche took its Carrera GT back to the Nürburgring in 2024 and went 16 seconds faster than it did in 2004 with no changes except for the tires, it was a big enough bump to make headlines—or, at least we thought so—and Porsche gave all of the credit to the car’s reengineered rubber.
The ‘ring is a massive track, to be sure. At nearly 13 miles long, the full Nordschleife circuit is less a race course than a country road with some spectacular safety upgrades. Even Porsche’s rambunctious V10-powered roadster needed a hair more than 7:32 to get all the way around. In that context, 16 seconds hardly seems like much. On paper, it seems even less significant—about a 3.5 percent improvement—but in a world where competitions are won and lost over tiny fractions of a second, 16 of them might as well be 16,000.
In competitive terms, that’s a serious spanking. Can tires alone really make that big of a difference? Naturally, we wanted to find out. To do so, we called on our friend and captive professional driver, Nik Romano, along with our friends at Toyo Tires. Conveniently enough, Toyo just replaced its long-running Proxes R1R with a brand-new, 200-treadwear model dubbed the Proxes Sport R, and they offered up factory-fresh examples of both for us to test back-to-back.
When it originally launched back in 2007, the R1R was just about the hottest 200-treadwear option around. Today, Grassroots Motorsports ranks it dead last among the “Super 200” options. Romano’s demonstration with the Toyota GR86 time attack car shows us why. While it has plenty of ultimate grip, the disconnected treads make the tire squirmy and finicky at the limit, where they need to live to take advantage of the exaggerated slip angles that make them shine.
After lapping Buttonwillow with the R1Rs, Romano swaps over to the new Proxes Sport R. The new tire not only offers more ultimate grip, but Toyo’s revised tread design and compound both make it far easier to approach the tire’s limits, which allows Romano to extract more performance. The newer, more-predictable rubber allowed him to brake later, hit higher mid-corner speeds, and get power down quicker out of each turn.
Romano then swapped the GR86 track special for a stock Honda Civic Type R just to see how those differences applied to something not set up for a race surface. Surprise surprise, the newer tire was once again quicker—about two seconds per lap quicker. Buttonwillow is not the Nürburgring, so a two-second gap here is pretty respectable. Toyo says the Sport R should be about 1.4% faster around a given track than the old R1R; Romano improved by 2.5% in the GR86 and 1.6% in the Civic.
As it turns out, two decades of innovation in tire tech really does make a difference.
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Byron is an editor at The Drive with a keen eye for infrastructure, sales and regulatory stories.
