John Simister
But don’t try the latter when it’s thawed, John warns
Winter driving, says John, was easier back in the day.
‘In big freezes in the Seventies, tyres were narrower and treads cut better’
It is snowing as I write this on the Herts/bucks border. Yesterday it snowed much more, eight inches deep around my house by the time I woke up and a foot on the hills nearby. It just happened to be the one night in months, years even, when I hadn’t put the Stiletto in the garage because its space was occupied by pieces of my Singer Le Mans in mid-brake overhaul.
Time was when I would have then gone straight out for a drive, Imps having excellent traction in the snow thanks to the engine’s weight over the rear wheels and a great ability to perform powerslides, but one reason I resisted the temptation was the downside of that rearward weight bias. The front wheels lock up too easily when braking on snow, and my garage is at the top of a downhill drive with a bend in it. Parked by that bend were my Citroën Xantia and Fiat 500 Twinair. Crumpled metal would have surely ensued.
Winter wheels
We went out in the snow anyway, taking the family Toyota Corolla Verso after I’d fitted the winter tyres and wheels to it and had regained feeling in my fingers. The roads were very quiet. Most cars on standard modern tyres, usually quite wide and their tread patterns consisting mostly of circumferential grooves rather than tread-blocks, were getting nowhere. The 4x4s fared better, but our front-wheel drive, winter-shod Toyota did better than they did if they were on regular rubber.
I remember driving in big winter freezes in the Seventies, and I don’t think cars were as easily defeated by snow then as they are today. Drivers may well have been more willing to ‘have a go’ then, and were more attuned to what was happening between tyre and road, but mostly I think it was because tyres were narrower and treads were better at cutting into the snow-and-slush surface.
The narrow-tyre advantage was demonstrated to me about a decade ago when I had a new Peugeot 207 THP 150 on standard-issue wide, low-profile tyres as a long-term test car, and it made no impression on the snowbound hill outside my house. I appropriated my daughter’s Peugeot 106 1.1 on skinny 155/70 R13 tyres and zoomed up the hill.
Ice-racing cars give an extreme illustration of this. I remember an issue of the Alfa Romeo Owners’ Club magazine in the early Eighties that had a cover photo showing an Alfasud Trofeo race on snow, the cars’ tyres barely as wide as a 2CV’S. Yet, at the opposite extreme, top rally drivers have been known to use purpose-designed slicks on snow and ice. It’s not just the tread pattern that gives the grip, it’s also the rubber compound and its ability to bond momentarily with the ice, as your wet finger does to an ice cube. The rubber in winter road tyres has an element of this characteristic.
Scandinavian skills
Winter tyres were very different designs in those gung-ho Sixties and Seventies, though. Back then, it was all about very chunky tread patterns able to munch, cogwheel-like, into the snow. That genre seems to have disappeared as far as applications for ordinary road cars are concerned, although off-road 4x4 tyres still have something of the look.
Better than any of these snow solutions are studded tyres. I happily remember from a timed ice sprint on a frozen lake in Norway in 1984 driving Volvo 740 Turbo estates. Huge drifts, fine-honing of opposite lock skills… it was brilliant. You can’t really drive with studs on exposed tarmacadam, though. Grip becomes skitteringly hopeless and the studs wear away. But if you ever get a chance to try them, say on a hire car in the north of Scandinavia, give them a go. Up there, even the buses do graceful four-wheel drifts.