Re: GTV-6 tires

[Richard Welty <rwelty@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 3 Aug 2003 02:08:31 -0400 Joe Elliott <jee@domain.elided> wrote:

> I think the time has come where I can finally justify spending the 
> money to get decent tires for my poor GTV-6.  Unfortunately, I know 
> very little about tires, so I thought I'd as the collective wisdom of 
> the digest what tires I should get for a GTV-6 with stock wheels that 
> gets driven in the snow in the winter and autocrossed in the summer. 

hmmm. autocross and snow is an awfully wide application band. i suggest
buying an extra set of gtv-6 wheels (the original alloys aren't that hard
to come by) and mounting a separate set of tires.

for snow, i'd go with a hakkapolita (or equivalent, nokia has brought out
their old classic nr09 or nr10 under a different name from from the
hakkapolita brand, at a much lower price). i'm becoming less and less of a
fan of the blizzak, i think they wear out way too fast. and i have a pair
of semperit ice grip 2s on the front of my 164 that worked extremely well
last winter, and i'm going to get 2 more so i can dispense with the pirelli
winter 190s on the rear this winter.

for summer, the kumho ecsta looks like a good price performance tradeoff,
an economy tire that should work well for your autocross application, there
are a number of variants which you can peruse on the tirerack web site.

> I'd also like to ask where to buy them.  I've got two weeks to buy 
> them and get them mounted before I go back to school.  I imagine I'd 
> order from a place like tirerack.com, but I'm wondering how long it 
> usually takes to get them delivered.

the tire rack is a couple of days, tops, if they have it in stock. they
have warehouses all over the country. i'm not sure they carry the snow
tires i just recommended.

also, do some shopping on the web and then check your local tire stores and
see what they can get and what kind of package price they'll give you (that
is, mounting included.) by the time you factor in shipping and mounting,
the local store may be competitive.
 
> As for the tires themselves, I always figured that I'd get 205's, but 
> the sizes that I've seen suggest make me think they'd throw off the 
> speedometer a little bit, and I'm awfully proud that my GTV-6 speedo 
> is damn near 100% accurate throughout its range.

use narrower tires for winter (say, the stock size) and wider ones .

> What exactly is the performance benefit of wider tires.  If 
> the friction were Newtonian, there shouldn't be any difference.

but it isn't. the wider tire in theory has a larger contact patch, more
rubber in contact with the asphalt. on dry pavement this is good, as what
happens is that the rubber deforms into the asphalt and then resists
lateral motion. on snow, you want a different effect, you want the snow to
deform to match the tread and then provide the resistance.

>  I 
> suppose I should also ask if the GTV-6 will become incontrollable in 
> the snow with 205mm tires rather than stock 195's.

with good tires, you can make it work. my wife's benz has 205 width snow
tires, and it is fairly drivable on snow with blizzaks on it. our driveway
always triggers the traction control, though.

driving in snow, i suggest you wash the car after every major salt event.

richard
-- 
Richard Welty                                         rwelty@domain.elided
Averill Park Networking                                         518-573-7592
    Java, PHP, PostgreSQL, Unix, Linux, IP Network Engineering, Security
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