CHRIS HARRIS
Tyres and technology have come a long way, says Chris, especially when it comes to preventing sideways action
Beware wet roads on the back of a dry spell. Not wishing to sound old and crusty, but this was one of the first things that my mother taught me about driving. Motorcyclists still cling to it as a potentially life-extending mantra, but the modern motor car with its acronym orgy of safety aids no longer needs to bother, because the suite of driver assistance fitted to modern performance cars is now so damn good. The most a driver will notice about a road surface that has shifted from grippy to oiled snake skin, is less shove and a yellow light frantically blinking on the dashboard.
Then there are these modern tyres. Most people assume the black things that cars roll around on are the same as they always were. They aren’t. The latest Michelin Pilot Sport 4S tyre is possibly the single most impressive car related item I’ve tested in the past decade. The grip it can summon from a slippery surface sometimes defies belief, yet on a dry day it behaves like a track day special. Last week, I wished my M2 had been fitted with a set as I inadvertently reminded myself why the things listed above are so impressive.
On the back of several balmy days it had rained overnight and my ‘watch out, it’s slippery today’ spidey senses were possibly not on the highest alert. Furthermore, the M2 Competition is much more fun to drive with the ESP partly disabled in a Sport mode that probably has a much more complicated name I cannot remember. And the car is running a set of much more aggressive Cup tyres that don’t especially enjoy low temperatures and precipitation. You can probably guess where this is headed.
“IT HAD RAINED OVERNIGHT AND MY SPIDEY SENSES WERE NOT ON THE HIGHEST ALERT”
The motorway slip road is empty, the Today programme is making me feel cleverer than I am and then all of a sudden I think, “Why am I looking out of the side window?” Now, this situation is one of the few aspects of modern life I am actually qualified to deal with, on account of deliberately looking out of side windows for a few decades, but I wasn’t anticipating it happening. As the problem was dealt with by way of some arm twirling and choice vernacular, the words of the man from some BMW launch event swirled around in my head: “In M Performance mode, traction assistance is reduced and it’s potentially possible to rotate the vehicle.” M Performance, that’s what it’s called, not Sport mode.
But the lack of grip once unprotected by the clever software was pretty alarming. And it made me think just how much tyre/ electronics advances have changed the way we interact with these fast road cars. These days we don’t think twice about jumping in anything with north of 500bhp no matter the weather, but it wasn’t long ago very fast cars were so rogue that under the same conditions you daren’t use them. I remember the Autocar car park being littered with exotics at weekends because we were too scared of having a tank slapper when the rain came. One freezing December evening I decided my car obsession must surely overcome the dangers and took a Viper GTS home. Two hours later, I was facing the wrong way on the Wandsworth one way system
– no damage done – but the thing had rotated at well under 30mph. So the next time you casually jump into your very fast car and it rains, and you don’t really notice any great difference in the way it drives, say a quiet thank you to the foreheads that wrote the code for that ESP system and the chemist who somehow made a compound that sticks regardless of wetness or temperature. They have literally transformed the way modern cars perform.