QUOTE
How much wear can you put on tires with a 2000lb car.
Quite a bit, actually. A decade ago, when I autocrossed seriously, I ran the then hot Yoko A008RSII, which not only really sucked in the rain, but was soft enough that 500 street miles would eat them up. The treadwear rating was, I recall, below 100 (80 springs to mind, but I can't remember for certain). I drove on them to a couple of events really close to the house (10 miles), but generally changed at the event. Back in the day, there was a night and day difference between even the best street tires and geniune AX tires, and no one serious ran a double-duty tire. At my best, I was still a no-hoper at the National level, and mid-pack at the Divisional level, but my times were still 2-3sec faster on a 60-sec course with the AX tires v. the best I could buy in streetable tires at the time, and I never optimized the car to run on either type of tire. If I'd futzed with the alignment to suit the A008s, I may have done even better with them.
At that time, the SCCA didn't have any rules regarding treadwear numbers. They just specified DOT legal for Stock classes. At least then, the treadwear numbers were not issued or enforced by any impartial agency. They were a voluntary scale used by the manufacturers, who were essentially free to use whatever numbers they liked with no penalty other than to credibility. It was this fact that argued against using treadwear numbers in class rules, as there was nothing like the impartial DOT testing to establish that the manufacturers weren't fudging the rating, rather than the tire compound, to meet the rules.
If Falken has, in fact, been able to come up with a tire that can be used on the street for even 30K miles AND produces AX times within a second of whatever the top AX tires are today, that's a big advance, bogus treadwear numbers or not.