recommend a good tire gauge

[Ginger]

I feel like if I were to read a select handful of posts from this thread what I would deduce is that tire gauges don't have to be accurate and you shouldn't expect them to be. Also, if I'm a racer, and I did my practice sessions and qualifying on one set of tires, and then went out on a new set of tires for the race where everyone is still doing 95% effort on the first lap, I'm an idiot. All because I expect to be able to trust my tire pressure gauge.

That just sounds.. wrong.

If you took a select bunch of posts from other contradictory topic threads you'd develop an equally compellingly silly conclusion.

Chad's saying consistency is important... I agree. I think this argument that things are different for motorcyclists is silly. I can tell when my tires aren't working right and fix it before it becomes a problem... and I don't go out a new brand of tires without testing out pressures with my personal gauge. You're a more experienced track rider than I am and I think you'd agree that if you can't tell when your tires are sucking that you've got no business racing.

Saying "well, I got these race tires that I couldn't test because I had to use qualifiers for grid position" doesn't hold water, either (I'm not going back to read again, but I thought I read something like this). Are you going to go out on a model race tire you've never used before? I'm not. If I get a new tire, test it and find it good at 33 on my gauge, then when time comes to mount the next set I'll put them on at 33 on my gauge and be able to reasonably expect the same results. I also don't think it's that bright to set them based on reccomendations you've heard various places.

We've seen here, in a motorsports enthusiast group, that lots of our gauges won't read the same. Between RJ and I we found that we had 3 or 4 gauges, none of which read the same. So why is it reasonable to assume that your gauge will read similar to the guy who your got your reccomendation from? If your gauge is +/- 1psi and the guy that did the testing is +/- 1 as well then you've got the potential to be 2psi off already. And if you drop your gauge?

Get one gauge that will read consistently, find out what works for your tires based on that gauge, and be happy. I don't think that's entirely unreasoanble.