Quote Originally Posted by mach1 View Post
Boom! $814 shipped from tire rack vs $1100+ for RR's, love it!
Interesting stuff. I have heard so many times that Toyo is so generous with their contingencies. At first blush it even seems true. But are they really? Does anyone think the cost of the contingency (and all the money paid to NASA as a sponsor/advertiser) is baked into the cost we pay for tires? Of course it is. It’s a business. Toyo isn’t a charity with a goal of supporting indigent racers. They are trying to make money.

So we pay extra for tires with the hope that we can do well enough to get some of it back. More realistically, it’s the slower racers that are effectively subsidizing the faster guys. It’s probably a bit more than that, though. Since we are mandated to use these tires, they can charge a bit more than normal market forces would dictate. Actually, it’s way worse than that. They have designed the tires so that the only way to realistically get substantial money back is to spend even more money on tires more often. It’s a positive feedback loop with Toyo laughing at us. It’s way more ingenious than just doubling the price and then getting everyone excited about a half off sale.

Does anyone like to turn in their Toyo bucks? I know I do. It’s like scratching off the last box and finding that you have won $500. You show it off to your friends and they are jealous. No thought is ever given to the fact that your prize came from a stack of scratch offs that you blew $1K on. You don’t even care that you didn’t actually win anything. You know the fine print on the back says the only thing you can do with your winnings is buy more scratch offs. What else would you do, anyway???

The good news for those that want to get off of the merry go round for some reason is that you can usually dump your big Toyo prizes on one of your friends for at least $.60 on the dollar. Yeah!


Richard P.