The tread mill
AUSTRALIA’S voracious appetite for premium and high-performance cars suggests buyers are increasingly willing to spend up big in order to enjoy their motoring. Yet, at the same time, Wheels’ tyre industry sources say there are plenty of people who will cheap-out when it’s time for a new set of rubber, inadvertently removing handling and stopping performance from their car.
Those that fork out for a fast car would likely do the same for high-quality new tyres, and we can certainly see the value in spending an extra $10K to step from a WRX to an STI, or from a Golf GTI to an R. But what we just don’t get is how to rationalise increasing your car’s stopping distance and reducing its cornering grip and feel, just to save a couple of hundred bucks on tyres.
Without giving too much away, the magnitude of the difference between the best and worst rubber on the 2017 Wheels Tyre Test was 3.2 metres of braking distance in the dry, and 4.6 metres in the wet, which sounds to us like enough of a reason to choose decent tyres.
The difference in lap time on the handling circuit was 1.85sec, which seems like plenty even before you consider that the two-lap dash takes less than 60 seconds. And we didn’t even test any truly dud tyres…
Rather, the Tyre Test sets out to sort the good from the great, across five test disciplines that represent the full spectrum of tyre ability, aside from wear-life, which is tough to measure in two days.
The tarmac surrounding the Sydney Dragway scrutineering shed provided the venue, and the stopwatches and Racelogic Performance Box offered up the data. Seasoned Tyre Test steerer Renato Loberto guided the Mazda 6 Touring wagon while cutting to the core of tyre performance with his insightful observations.
After taking a tyre noise reading at a 60km/h cruise, Ren ripped into a series of hot laps of our compact handling circuit, which served to scrub the surface of the tyres. This led into a trio of circuit sprints against the stopwatch. Then Ren rolled into the slalom and dry braking test, followed by three stops on a consistently wet surface. Each dynamic test discipline is scored out of 10, and tyre noise is out of five. Scores are assigned relative to the best performer – if one tyre wins all, it would achieve a perfect 100 percent in the final scoring, and our winner got close, at 98.2 percent.
A control tyre was deployed at regular intervals as a means of measuring track and car evolution, which could be addressed in the analysis. The results, served up over the next nine pages, reflect the range of ability on offer in Oe-replacement tyres across a moderate price range. Each tyre pattern tested is available in a wide range of sizes, and the results apply broadly to each of them, as well as on cars with different chassis and drive layouts.