Tyre question

[NRG]

Couldn't find the Tiff vid so this will have to do....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xzQQ...e_gdata_player

[Alex_UK]

I sit corrected, then - I'll remember that for the future if I ever another get a front wheel drive car.

[brian2957]

Oh, good grief. Why do people buy these things? Economising on tyres is not the thing to do.

Particularly with a new young driver .

[Covenant]

Particularly with a new young driver .

It was only by constant nagging and a bribe that I got him to replace the illegal front ones. The back ones were on when he bought it.
The whole car will get checked out after the door repair but it's no wonder than things get scrimped when insurance costs so much.

[brian2957]

Yup you're right mate . Fortunately my 18 year old daughter shares a fairly new car with her mother and it gets checked / serviced regularly . However insuring her is bliddy ridiculous . She's at Uni. so couldn't afford to do it herself .

[walpurgis]

A bit of minor front drift may be easy enough to deal with, but a sudden front end skid is not easy to correct for an average driver. Having spent the best part of twenty years in the past building, tuning and driving fast BL Minis, with all sorts of combinations of tyres and suspension I think I've encountered probably every type of handling situation a front wheel drive car can throw at you, including sudden oversteer/understeer/roll-oversteer transitions and I'd definitely rather have the back end prone to letting go than the front, anytime. It's far easier to catch and recover.

[MartinT]

Me too, Geoff. Also there's the incontrovertible fact that most of the braking bias in cars comes from the front wheels. I'd rather have my best tyres there and deal with a little tail waggle.

[shane]

Me too. I always put new on the front. I was just pointing out the "official" advice.

[walpurgis]

Me too. I always put new on the front. I was just pointing out the "official" advice.

"official" advice is given out by 'experts' and they're not always right. In my book you can be an authority on a topic, but 'expert' implies total knowledge. Nobody knows everything about any subject. Having come from a professional/technical background, I've seen many an 'expert' come unstuck

[kenworthy100]

The debate is also complicated by new developments like Dynamic Stability Control, further a number of higher performance cars have different tyre sizes between front and rear axle,Lotus Elise S1 195/50 x15 front, 225/45 x16 rear as an example.