Two Guys Rally

Tires: Often Overlooked
[ June 13th, 2008 ] By: Mark Ozimek Posted in » Ramblings

It seems to me that when people want to upgrade their car to give better performance, they focus a lot on creating more power. Sometimes there will be brake upgrade or suspension modifications, but rarely do I hear or read people talk about the best performing tires for their car, and I really don’t know why.

When it comes to making a car move somewhere, accelerate, decelerate, turn, slide, whatever it is you make your car do, the tires are what provide the traction to do so. Perhaps one problem is that there are performance tires for almost every application. High performance dry tires, mud tires, snow tires, rain tires, hell, even ice tires. There are so many choices to choose from, It makes me wonder if many just pick out any old all season tire for the ease of use and practicality. Even then, within a segment, tires are all different. Some are softer, providing more grip and faster wear, the tread design is different, the sidewall thickness is different, even the contact patch width varies between tires of the same ‘width’.

But do not let this faze you. Tires are, in my opinion, the most important piece of equipment on the car to understand. Now I’m not asking that everyone knows which compound and tread combination will give the best traction on a dry surface at a 10º slip angle, but please, just use common sense and get a nice set of tires.

Why do I bring this up? Well, I finally got the opportunity to take my winter tires off my car the other weekend and put the all seasons that were on the car when I bought it back on. The difference in handling, and general amount of traction available is incredible. The snow tires I had on were Dunlop SP Winter Sport 3D’s, and they should really be called all season tires with a tread that makes it good in snow. In comparison, the actual all seasons have a much less aggressive tread. As a result, the predictability in hard cornering is much better, and all around traction when the roads are dry is far superior to the snow tires. But then when the roads get wet, the snow tires deal with the water much better, no doubt thanks to the deeper tread.

So yeah, next time you start budgeting out parts for your car, be sure to include a nice set of tires that work well in your application. For Charles and I, we’ll probably aim for a set of all seasons with good mud and dirt capabilities for the rally car.