Picture a fresh-cut SS-33A punching 52 on a Shore A durometer at seventy degrees ambient — and then picture that same tire on a calcium clay bullring in southern Indiana that's gone from soupy to glass in fourteen laps. Choosing wrong by even one compound slot, and you're watching three tenths evaporate every single corner. This is Hunter's Column Lab. I'm HUNTER, with Hast on the call. Tonight we crack Column thirty-three wide open — the Burris compound ladder that nobody posts online, the single most misunderstood decision in spec karting, the 33A versus B33B, why your cut profile IS your chassis setup on a kart with zero suspension, and how a competitive Burris program costs more rubber inventory than any other brand in grassroots karting. This is Hunter's Column Lab. We read the column so you don't have to skim the data boxes.
HUNTER Column thirty-three dropped this week and it is dense in the best possible way — the full Burris compound ladder from SS-11 softest slick all the way to the SS-55 on aggressive calcium clay, the TX treaded series mapped against surface conditions, and the reason competitive Burris spec trailers carry thirty to sixty tires at eighty-three to ninety-nine dollars a unit. That's a library that costs between twenty-five hundred and six thousand dollars in rubber alone, just for a kart class. On the big-series side, Aaron Reutzel is absolutely on a tear in High Limit Racing — he took Kokomo Speedway on May ninth and then won again at Grandview Speedway on May nineteenth, putting together five wins in his last eight starts with the Ridge and Sons Racing Team. Tonight High Limit is back in Indiana at Lawrenceburg Speedway, so there's more data coming.
HAST Yeah, and the Reutzel run is worth noting because Kokomo is a calcium clay bullring — exactly the track type the column is talking about when it explains why the SS-55 exists. Surface bite building hard through the night, softer compounds blistering by lap eight of the feature. The compound science we are talking about in the column connects directly to every dirt oval, karts up through sprint cars. Also worth flagging — AKRA dropped Version 1 of the 2026 four-cycle dirt tech manual, so if you're running Clone or Ducar on dirt this year, that document is now live at akraracing.com and it's the rulebook your tire choices have to fit inside.
HUNTER Search any karting encyclopedia online and you will find exactly zero useful words about Burris tire compounds on dirt. You'll find Bridgestone rain specs for European circuits. You'll find Mojo D5 hardness charts for CIK homologation. You will not find what compound to bolt on a Clone kart at a calcium clay bullring in southern Indiana when the track goes from soupy to glass in fourteen laps. That gap is not an oversight — it's a tell. The people who know Burris do not write encyclopedias. They build tire libraries in enclosed trailers that cost more than their tow vehicles. Column thirty-three is the encyclopedia they never wrote.
HAST The compound ladder itself runs softest to hardest — SS-11, 22, 33, 44, 55 — and that looks simple, but it is not simple. The SS-22 works on natural clay and dies on prepped calcium chloride because the chemical interaction between calcium-C-L and the 22 compound accelerates heat degradation. If your track runs calcium, skip the 22 entirely for features. The workhorse pair is the SS-33A and B33B — same construction, different compound chemistry. A fresh SS-33 punches approximately 52 on a Shore A durometer at seventy degrees ambient, and that is where seventy percent of Burris spec racing lives. The B33B runs slightly softer, built specifically for dry-slick, genuinely low-bite surfaces where the kart slides on entry no matter what you do to the chassis.
HUNTER The TX treaded series runs those same compound numbers on a six-inch treaded carcass — inflation range six to twelve psi — designed for wet or high-horsepower dirt where you need the tire to dig rather than slide. TX-11 for maximum moisture, TX-22 for less moisture, TX-33 for a surface transitioning from moist to dry. If you are running treaded tires on a packed surface, you brought the wrong rubber. Full stop. Now the cut profile section is where the column gets genuinely surgical. On a kart with zero suspension, the tire IS the suspension. High crown versus flat cut on the same compound, same pressure, same kart — measurably different lap times, two to five tenths on a one-fifth-mile track. Brian Carlson at Carlson Racing in Linden, Indiana runs seven or more cutting templates on his RS-series machines, and the rule is inverse and absolute — higher track bite means flatter cut, lower track bite means rounder crown.
HAST And then the library dimension is what makes new kart racers' eyes go wide. Competitive Burris spec isn't four tires — it's five dimensions multiplying each other: compound, date code, cut profile, prep level, and tread depth with roundness. Fresh rubber is chemically different from aged rubber because plasticizers migrate over time, the compound hardens, the surface chemistry changes. A ten-year-old set of 33s can be genuinely faster than a six-month-old set at a non-date-code local event. So you need fresh inventory for date-code marquee races and old sets for locals — that is two inventories for the same compound. Multiply those five dimensions and you understand why a regional competitor needs twenty to twenty-eight tires minimum, running roughly seventeen hundred to twenty-eight hundred dollars in rubber just to be serious across three to five tracks.
HUNTER Here is the take I want to plant a flag on — the 33A versus B33B decision is the most underrated chassis adjustment in budget dirt karting, and racers keep treating it like a coin flip. It is not a coin flip. The B33B generates more chemical grip at the contact patch on genuinely dead, dry-slick surfaces — we're talking a difference of two to four tenths per lap on a one-sixth-mile bullring. That is stagger territory. That is crossweight territory. You don't make two to four tenths back on a bullring with a chassis tweak alone — but racers spend hours on stagger and skip the compound decision entirely.
HAST Okay, but here's where I want to push back on that framing — because the column also says the B33B falls off fast on high-bite surfaces, and that is the real trap. The racers who are skipping the compound decision aren't being lazy, they are being cautious, because rolling in with B33B on a track that builds calcium bite through the night means you are blistering compound by feature time. The SS-33A is the safe call precisely because it behaves consistently across a wide temperature range. The penalty for calling the wrong compound is worse than the reward for calling it right, and I think the column undersells that asymmetry when it frames this as an underrated adjustment.
HUNTER That is fair pushback, but I think it actually proves the point. The reason B33B is underrated is not because racers don't know the risk — it is because they don't have the tire log to know when their specific track qualifies as genuinely low-bite versus temporarily dry-slick. Brian Carlson has said outright that prepping Burris is about adding bite moreso than softening — so on the nights where nothing fires chemically, the B33B plus your prep program gives you two bite levers instead of one. The racers who win those nights aren't lucky. They built the library.
HAST And that is exactly why the column calls it a library, not four tires. One set is not a program — it is a guess.
HUNTER Other dirt racing results from this past week — High Limit Racing ran Port Royal Speedway in Pennsylvania across the May twenty-second through twenty-fourth weekend, keeping the series momentum rolling through the mid-Atlantic. Aaron Reutzel came into that stretch already carrying five wins in eight starts for the Ridge and Sons Racing Team after the Grandview Speedway victory on May nineteenth. On the karting side, the SoCal Dirt Karters Championship Series ran Round Three of their nine-race schedule at Perris Raceway Flat Track on May ninth. Luke Papps took the feature win, holding off Brandon Hubbard across sixteen laps, with Garry Papps recording the fastest lap of the race on his way to third.
HAST The Perris result is interesting from a setup standpoint — a brief shower between heat races added moisture mid-program and changed surface conditions for the rest of the evening, exactly the scenario where your TX versus slick decision and your compound selection on the slick side become real-time calls. Whether those karts were on 33s or something softer given the moisture window, that mid-program track change is live Column thirty-three material happening in real time at a weekly show in southern California.
HAST Quick hits — High Limit Racing is at Lawrenceburg Speedway tonight, May twenty-ninth, right here in Indiana. Lawrenceburg is a fast half-mile, which means shock valving and spring rate decisions at the 410 level are polar opposite from the bullring bite-management conversation we just had for karting — bigger track, more momentum, you need the chassis to flow, not rotate. Worth watching how the setup conversations evolve after tonight's result.
HUNTER Also on the radar — the AKRA 2026 four-cycle dirt tech manual is Version 1, meaning revisions are possible before summer. If you are building your Clone or Ducar program around tire rules embedded in that manual, download it now and check the tire specification language specifically, because compound restrictions at the series level are what determine whether your B33B is even legal before you start making the performance call. Read the rulebook before you build the library. That's Column thirty-three. Five dimensions, thirty to sixty tires, and a compound ladder that the people who actually know it never wrote down — until now. Next week we go deeper into prep chemistry, Burris-specific, because the thick tread interaction with prep is a completely different animal than anything Maxxis or Cobra runners are used to. Read Column thirty-three at racer.wiki — the full compound table, the cut profile rules, and the inventory calculator are all in there. Hunter out. Read the full column at racer.wiki.