How to Warm Up Kart Tires Faster: Fronts First, Then the Rears

Remember to warm up the tires, Alessio. That's what my mechanic Piero always used to say when we were racing together in our golden years, between 2012 and 2014. I never forgot his words. They're stuck in my subconscious now, part of who I am.

As boring and repetitive as it sounds, warming up the tires is extremely key if you want performance from lap one, whether it's qualifying or a race. You don't want the performance coming on lap seven, because that's too late. If you can get the tires ready on lap one, you have a massive advantage over the other drivers. Because the reality is, believe me, even at WSK and CIK level almost nobody warms up the tires like they're supposed to. Almost everybody is leaving lap time on the table in the first few laps.

The vicious cycle Max Verstappen started at Lonato

I remember one driver, his name was Max Verstappen, at the 2011 Winter Cup at Lonato. I was watching him from the grandstands, one category above me, and I was blown away. He would warm the tires so much, not only in the formation lap but also in his first push lap. It was incredible. He would literally bring smoke up from his rear tires by how hard he was braking, by how much speed he was carrying, by how hard he was pushing.

That would in turn not only give him fast lap times, but way more temperature, which automatically gives more grip. And that's a vicious cycle. More grip, faster speed. Faster speed, faster lap times. And faster speed equals even more temperature, and more temperature equals more grip.

It's literally a vicious cycle. And it all starts by purposely pushing those tires to get the tire temperature.

Is tire temperature more important than pressure?

Yes. The grip coefficient, which at the end of the day is friction, comes down to temperature. It's massively influenced by it. Tire pressure has an effect in the equation, but most of it is due to temperature.

You can already have the tires set at the optimal pressure, say 0.90 bar, if that's the hot target for whatever tires you're on. You could start at 0.90 with cold tires, and you'll see you won't have the same grip level, and obviously the same lap times, as when the tires are in the optimal operating window. That goes to show it's not so much about tire pressures, it's much more about tire temperatures. Of course, the goal is to nail both: when you have the optimal temperature you also have the optimal pressure at the same time, and that's when you get the best lap times. I went through the pressure side separately. This is the temperature side.

And the only one responsible for getting those tires warmed up as quickly as possible is not the coach, not the mechanic, not your data guy, not your dad or your mom, not even your team manager. It's you, and you only.

You are the only one responsible for your tire temperatures, and therefore for your grip level.

That's true in the first few laps, and it's true at the end of the race. If you're over-pushing the tires, sliding them too many times and overheating them beyond the operating window, then you're hurting yourself, and you are the responsible one. Nobody else. So you need a procedure, a clear procedure stamped in your mind, so you're not guessing every time what to do to warm up the tires. You need a really clear idea of what you're going to do as soon as you leave the pits.

Use every millisecond, but don't slide them

The thing I remind myself and my drivers at Babyrace and Senndit is that you have to use every millisecond you have to get those tires warmed up. Every millisecond you waste in a formation lap by going straight with no effort on the tires is temperature you're not building that you could have built. And that's lap time, or even positions, lost in the first few laps. Same in the outlap of a qualifying.

That doesn't mean sliding the tires like crazy, almost spinning every time. You've got to do it mindfully, otherwise F1 drivers would be drifting every corner before a race. Why don't they? Because there's a downside, especially with fresh new soft tires. You don't want to over-stress them when they're brand new and cold. You need to progressively bring them up to temperature. You almost have to massage them into the window without stressing them too much.

I know that's a fine line. You're like, Alessio, you're telling me to warm the tires up as much as I can and not waste a millisecond, but at the same time not to stress them too much. Yes. There are two separate things. One is warming up the tires: progressively putting load and energy into them, getting them to do the work. The other is sliding them, going beyond the slip angle too much. When the tires are cold and at low pressures, that's going to damage them. You create graining, where the inside of the tire is still cold and the outside is too hot.

You want a progressive tire build-up from the inside to the outside. And you don't want to be too gentle about it either.

So you rush it, but you rush it in a way that A, you don't slide the tires too much, and B, you don't go outside the racing line to warm the tires with excessive weaving. Because that creates another problem: pickup. Dirt not only reduces the grip level, it cools the tires down. When you pick up dirt, dirt is not warm. Dirt is cold. Stones, grass, mud, even just tire pickup, whatever you pick up is going to cool the tires, which is the opposite of what you want. So if the track is very dirty off the racing line, don't weave excessively. Stay as much as you can on the racing line, do very little weaving, but still put energy and load into the tires.

Formation lap and qualifying outlap are two different procedures

The reality is that during a qualifying session, or even a simple free practice session, you won't be weaving that much. It's more about starting to push. If you start to push early, you'll get the temperature in much more than if you weave and make chicanes on the straights.

In a formation lap for a race, you can't push. You have to go at the pace of the leader. Ideally you are the leader and set the pace, but you can't make a push lap in the formation lap. You have to go slow and pack the group behind you. So that's when you weave to build the temperature. And you wouldn't repeat that formation-lap procedure in a qualifying session, because there you can go fast.

So whether you're driving shifters, juniors, single-speed karts, whatever, you can't warm up the tires the same way in a race as in qualifying or practice. In a formation lap you're going a lot slower and you have to respect the procedure, so the only way to build temperature is as many zigzags as possible, left to right, right to left, using the brakes, using the throttle, using your body, putting the kart on three wheels all the time so you're working and stressing the tires. That should be the actual focus of a driver in a formation lap. I broke down rolling versus standing starts on Senndit if you want the race-day side.

My qualifying outlap procedure: combine the G forces

In qualifying, or any pre-practice session, my standard operating procedure is this. I come out of the pits and I use every millisecond. I instantly want to build some tire temperature, because every little extra warming you do early in the outlap compounds. It really adds up. If the initial warm-up is too little, you arrive at the end of the outlap, or the start of the first push lap, lagging behind the driver who warmed the tires much more proactively. It's the difference between being lazy at warming the tires and being strategic about it.

So you come out of the pits and you instantly start a bit of weaving, you use the brakes, you get on the throttle, on the brakes, on the throttle, and you try to combine these things. You brake while turning left, then accelerate while turning right, then brake while turning right, then accelerate while turning left. You do a lot of combined.

The goal is to combine lateral and longitudinal G as much as possible. Combine acceleration and turning. Then combine braking and turning.

That's the same overlap of brake and lateral G you see in the friction circle, and it's exactly why coasting leaves tires cold: coasting massages the tires when you should be stressing them.

And you want to get all four tires warmed up. Don't warm up only the outside tires, the left tires in a clockwise circuit, or the right-hand tires in an anti-clockwise circuit like Le Mans, where they'll hold the World Championship for the shifters in 2026. Getting those outside tires into the operating temperature is important, because that's where you'll do the most laps and need the most grip as soon as possible. If you have to choose, you prioritize the loaded side, the side with more corners. It's counterintuitive, because you'd say those tires warm up faster anyway. It's a bit of a controversial topic.

What I do is get the outside tires, for where you have the most corners, warmed up first. Then, when those feel good, when I feel I have grip, I immediately shift focus to the inside tires, the right-hand tires in a clockwise circuit. Those are going to struggle for most of the laps if they're not hot, and most drivers neglect them. This is not too much of a science. It's more of an art. It's hard to quantify how much effort to put on one side versus the other. You build a feeling and self-correct: okay, I need to warm these more, they're not there yet. Or, no, these are already quite ready, let's warm the other side. You need to be mindful of that at any given time, in the first outlap and in the first push.

Why are the front tires the hard part?

Now the first push lap. Even though you don't want to slide the tires, especially when they're soft, there's a lot of grip on the track and you started with low pressure, you still want to heat them up in the most efficient and fastest way possible. The way I like to do that is to attack the entries of the corners. Attack the entries, especially the heavy braking zones, and you get a huge amount of warm-up, especially on the front tires.

Think about it. The rear tires have an easy time getting warm. If you have a lot of power, like a shifter kart with 52 or 53 horsepower, you have a lot of torque, and just by getting on the throttle with traction you get a lot of rear grip and rear temperature super soon. The difficult part is the fronts, because a kart is rear-wheel drive. When you weave you're warming the rears more. You do warm the fronts a bit, but not much. The moment you warm the fronts is when the weight transfers forward under braking, and when you use steering angle in the mid-corner.

In formula cars you'd purposely use extra steering angle in the formation lap to scrub the fronts and create extra grip. In karting you really don't want to do that. I don't think it's right to purposely scrub the fronts. The best thing for the fronts is to push a lot on the braking and carry a lot of entry speed, transitioning the weight from rear to front. When you brake deeply, especially with front brakes in a shifter kart, but also in the categories without front brakes, single-speed karts like juniors, seniors and mini, the weight shifts forward and the front tires have a lot of work to do. That's what you want.

The fronts are the difficult part. Push deeply on the braking. You won't slide the tires much on the braking, you'll slide them more in the fast corners.

So in a shifter, in a preparation lap, I try to be smooth on the throttle. I don't push too much, because then the rears are ready and the fronts are not, and you have understeer. It's not good for the balance, and I just hate understeer. I'm very gentle on the throttle so I don't heat the rears too quickly, but I push the fronts a lot so they get into temperature.

And again, it's not about tire pressures, believe me. It's about tire preparation in terms of driving. There's not much you can do in setup either. You can't put so much toe-out on the front to warm the tires faster, that's not what you should be doing. Do it with your driving style rather than relying on setup or pressures.

So be very calm on traction, especially with shifter karts, in the first two laps, but attack the entries a lot. That way the rears don't get ready too soon and the fronts get hurried up a bit.

The goal is to reach peak performance at the same time between the front tires and the rear tires. You don't want those two axles getting up to temperature at different times.

If you don't think about it and just drive instinctively, you'll notice the rears are ready super early and the fronts are not. The first two or three laps you have understeer. Then, when the fronts arrive on lap three, the rears are gone and you pick up oversteer, and the lap times just aren't there anymore. So be strategic, especially with shifters, and think about it a lot with juniors and seniors too. Get the fronts warmed up very fast, because the rears are going to get there inevitably.

Stay off the kerbs, and remember the brakes

One rule of thumb: I wouldn't use the kerbs too much, especially when you're running very low pressures in the summer. I'd stay away from them when warming up. That's something I learned on a test day in Formula 3 with Prema Powerteam. They taught me not to use the kerbs in the outlap when running low pressures, because it increases the chance of a puncture, and they were right. It could also damage the tires with blisters. There's no real point using the kerbs that much in a preparation lap. And I wouldn't push too hard in the fast corners either, because that's where you slide the tires the most.

Don't forget about the brakes. You may only worry about the rear and front tires, but the brakes also play a big part in performance, especially if you run very hard compounds in the disc or the pads. They need temperature. In that case you want a proper brake warm-up preparation, and that again comes from attacking the entries. That's basically what Max was doing. He was really pushing on the entries.

When the race starts, forget everything and push

When you start pushing in a race and it's cold, don't think too much about "I shouldn't slide the tires." No. As soon as you've warmed up the tires in the formation lap, forget about that. You just want to push. Forget what I said about not going beyond the slip angle. In the moment the race starts, that's game time. You have to push. That's what Max was doing: braking so hard the smoke came off his rear tires, which is the definition of going beyond the slip angle and generating a ton of work, and a ton of temperature. Then he'd pick up more grip and pull away from the field quite easily. He made it look easy, but the reality was that he mastered the tire preparation, the warm-up procedure, and the brakes, and that gave him an absolute advantage over drivers who didn't realize it.

So spend time perfecting your warm-up technique, because it really makes a difference. 99% of the time you'll need the tires warmer than they actually are in the first lap of the race. Even in the summer, when the track temps were 60 degrees, I was asking myself why we were still getting the lap time at the end of the race and driving one second slower in the first laps. The reality is that even though you feel the tires are hot, they're not hot yet. Not as hot as you think.

If you're not warming those tires early on, somebody else probably will, and they will kick your ass.

So if you don't want to get your ass kicked, and instead be the one who gets P1s, wins trophies, wins championships, gets pole positions, remember to warm up the tires like a Max Verstappen, like a proper legend. Not only in qualifying, but in the race. Make sure your tires are the hottest on the grid.

It's almost like a gamified statistic, like the F1 broadcast, that tells you the tire temps of every driver on the track. If there was a chance to see that, it would be awesome, because it would expose the drivers who warm up the tires the most against the ones who warm them the least, and you'd see the patterns in their performance in the opening laps. Really hot temperatures and you pull away from the field in the race. In quali you probably reach the peak temperature earlier, which means one or two laps at peak performance, whereas the others get half a lap, or just one lap, especially in colder winter conditions. Until that stat exists, the closest thing is your own data: compare your first push lap against your best lap, and look at how much time the opening laps leave on the table.

I hope that was useful. Remember to keep sending it, sign up to PURPL to get some insights from your MyChron data, and I can't wait to see you inside the Senndit six-month training program. I'll see you.