A huge wake-up call on picking the right tire for the season
Intuitively, most drivers know that winter tires — commonly referred to as snow tires — are less effective on summer roads than a summer or high quality allseason tire.
That assumption was — forgive the pun — driven home this spring by professional Canadian race-car driver and drift instructor Carl Nadeau. If there’s anyone who should understand tire characteristics, it’s Nadeau — and believe me, he does.
The Michelin Test
Quite bravely, Michelin convened a driving event in Vancouver at the PNE grounds in which they allowed participants to push identical cars shod in a variety of tires on a closed course under the instruction of master driver Nadeau. The point of the session was to demonstrate the potential loss of traction when winter tires are used on summer roads, and also to highlight the effectiveness of Michelin’s Premier all-season tire, which re-establishes an inner tread pattern with long-term wear. Michelin refers to this unique technology as Evergrip.
Most interesting to me was the dramatic difference between winter and nonwinter tires on both wet and dry surfaces in moderate temperatures.
For this demonstration, two identical Toyota Camrys were prepared by Michelin. The only difference was one rolled on Michelin X-Ice winter tires and the other on Michelin Primacy all-season tires.
The Course
Twisty with diminishing radius turns, the course designed by Nadeau was a challenging one, thankfully composed of harmless cones, given my over-exuberance at times. Nadeau made it clear, we were to push the cars — actually their tires — to the limit with the goal of feeling and hearing every nuance of sound and vibration to understand what was happening where “rubber meets the road.”
Unlike the humans relying upon them, tires are actually good communicators once their articulation is recognized and understood. This enables a trained driver to sense the edge of grip before the line is crossed. Where that line resides differs dramatically, depending on a number of tire-related factors, not the least of which are tire type (winter vs. summer), tire wear, and tire inflation.
All tires used in the Michelin event were new and properly inflated. First up in my series of test runs were Michelin’s Primacy allseason tires. The track had just been doused by the onsite rain truck, yet I heeded Nadeau’s instructions and went for it with three laps that had the Camry writhing in agony as the Primacy tires clawed for what little grip could be pulled from the slick pavement.
“Take note of your speed around the track,” Nadeau announced as I fought to keep the Camry between the cones through the corkscrew and stop boxes.
The vehicle’s stability control program had been deactivated to ensure that no digitally processed intervention would aid me in my struggle to manage understeer followed by oversteer. Each lap faster than the last, I was at the top of my game — or so I thought.
That game went radically south when I hit the track in the Camry shod in Michelin’s X-Ice winter tires. Now, in the world of winter tires, the X-Ice is a top contender. As such, one may think that it would perform as well as a non-winter tire on wet pavement. It has huge water-channelling capability and a soft, grippy rubber compound — right? Well that may be the case, but it doesn’t translate into a tire with anywhere near the performance capacity of a good summer or allseason tire.
I was a wild-man out of control on the track with the X-Ice tires, taking out cones like a weed-whacker in a patch of dandelions.
Not to sound too dramatic about it, but I was astonished at the decline in grip and control that I experienced with the winter tires. There was no possible way of reaching the same speed with these tires that I had attained beforehand. And when it came to a full emergency stop, the Camry slid well past the stop-point of the Primacy tires and, frankly, past my expected point of rest.