Tyre Temperature and Slip: Reading Your Tyres
# Tyre Temperature and Slip: Reading Your Tyres
Tyres are where every input on a car ends up. A telemetry dashboard can put the state of all four in your eyeline at once — temperature, and how much each one is sliding — which is information the game itself rarely gives you in a readable form.
This page covers the tyre readings a theme can draw. It is not a list of everything the app knows, and labels or available units may change between app versions.
The three groups
Twelve numbers, in three groups of four, one per wheel:
- Tyre temperature — front-left, front-right, rear-left, rear-right
- Tyre slip ratio — the same four wheels
- Combined slip — the same four wheels again
The pattern is the point: front and rear are compared against each other, and left against right. A single number tells you little; four numbers in a square tell you which corner is doing something different.
Temperature: °C or °F
Each tyre temperature is exactly that — how hot that tyre is, in °C or °F depending on your unit setting.
The reason it is worth four numbers rather than one is that the interesting information is in the difference. A car that is hot on both fronts and cool on both rears is telling you something about how you are loading it, and about what the next corner will feel like. A single "tyre temp" average would hide exactly that.
A reading that is too low is the one people underestimate. Cold tyres grip less, which is why the first lap of a session feels different from the third — and why a dashboard that shows all four lets you see that happening instead of just feeling it.
Too hot is the other direction: heat means the tyre is working hard, and a tyre that is working hard is a tyre being used up. The number is not a verdict, it is context for the lap you are about to drive.
Slip ratio: past 1.0, the tyre has given up
Tyre slip ratio per wheel is a ratio, not a percentage, and the useful reference point is 1.0: past that, the tyre has lost grip and is sliding rather than driving.
Read as four values, this is the clearest picture of understeer and oversteer a dashboard can give you. Front values climbing while the rears stay under 1.0 is the front washing out; the reverse is the rear stepping away. You usually feel both before you can name them — this is what naming it looks like.
Because the scale is small, only a handful of themes draw it, and they tend to be the ones built for people who want to watch a corner happen in numbers.
Combined slip: cornering and wheelspin together
Combined slip is the same idea with both kinds of sliding folded together — lateral slip from cornering and longitudinal slip from wheelspin — again as a ratio, again with 1.0 as the point where the tyre is sliding.
The difference from plain slip ratio is what it reveals: a tyre can be spinning up under power and sliding sideways at the same time, and combined slip is the reading that shows the total rather than one component of it. On a drift-oriented theme it is closer to the truth of what the car is doing than either component alone.
Reading the four as a square
The practical habit, once a theme shows all four corners, is to stop reading numbers and start reading a pattern:
- Which corner is the outlier? One hot or slipping tyre is almost always a loading story, not a bug.
- Front versus rear. This pair answers "is the car pushing or rotating".
- Left versus right. This pair answers "what did the last corner do to me".
- Change over time. A single snapshot is a number; two laps of the same corner is a trend.
None of this requires a competitive mindset. Plenty of people run a tyre-aware theme because four live temperatures look good on a cluster — the information is a bonus, not homework.
Units and settings
Temperatures switch between °C and °F in the app, independently of your speed and pressure units. Slip readings are ratios: they have no unit and no setting, and 1.0 means the same thing in every language.
As with every field, what you can see depends on the theme you are running — a theme that draws four temperatures does not necessarily draw slip, and vice versa.
A word on what these numbers are not
They are readings from the game, drawn faithfully. They are not a setup recommendation, not a coaching score, and not a prediction.
TachoDash is a display: it puts the game's own telemetry on a screen you can see. What you do about a rear-left tyre running hot is a question about your driving and your car, and the dashboard's job is only to make the question visible.
Where to go next
- Setting the app up for the first time? Connect FH5 or FH6.
- Revs, gear and pedal inputs? The power side.
- Cornering forces and lap timing? The chassis side.
Get TachoDash
TachoDash is available on the App Store and on Google Play. Themes that draw tyre data are in the theme library; the download page has both store links.
TachoDash is an unofficial fan-made project, not affiliated with Playground Games or Microsoft.
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