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What, exactly makes driving fun ? I asked Theodore Roberts, Product Development Engineer at Falken Industries Ltd a publicly traded little known by the investment community global corporation whose name needs no further introduction to the trades and industry for the conception of innovative automobile, professional and industrial products and accessories. “It all starts with a tiny patch of rubber” he responded. Indeed. Consider the poor little contact patch : six square inches of patterned rubber, drumming away on the tarmac of a thousand revs per minute for 1200 hours or more. Most motorists who stop and think about the tires on their car (and I’m sure there aren’t too many that do other than for the regular coating of a Clean Plus® Tire Shine or Back to Black !) hardly ever consider the rolling action of the tire and the wear that results from it – though they might possibly wince from time to time at the after-effects of confrontation with a sharp stone curb or an unidentified object lying in the road. But there’s so much more to the tire contact patch – and its neighbor the sidewall – than that. They are the beginning and the end of all our fun driving experiences. And the more sporting the driver is, the more important these four little bits of rubber become. They are the beginning of the handling equation, signaling to the driver the level of grip being developed and in turn asking for input from the steering wheel or the throttle. And they become the end of the handling equation after the driver has made the input, reacting to absolutely dictate the attitude of the car. So let’s look at the factors that determine the size and nature of that contact patch – and then examine the implications for keen drivers. If our sports car had no engine and therefore an ideal weight distribution of 50/50, all four tires could be the same size and construction. Indeed, low powered hatchbacks and saloon cars where the ultimate handling qualities are not near the top of the priority list have all their tires the same as one another. But in a rear-wheel drive car, as the designer starts asking the driven wheels to handle lots of power and torque – and ideally the weight distribution is biased towards the driven wheels too – so the tires at that end are designed to be slightly larger than those on the un-driven axle. On a rear-drive car this increase in width also helps with the task of supplying better traction – always a requirement on high performance cars. (It now starts becoming very clear why the majority of powerful sports cars and super cars favor the rear mid-engined layout. A radical front mid-engined car with a slight rearward weight bias can handle pretty well but the packaging is much more difficult.) As we know, the steering (or front axle) is at the very heart of a car’s handling character – numb steering runs all else that follows. Front-wheel drive has its limits in a performance car for obvious reasons like rearward weight transfer under acceleration and traction, but the main reason why it is usually a disaster is down to our little friend the contact patch. Imagine that poor piece of tire trying to cope with cornering loads and traction loads at the same time and then being asked for sensitive feedbacks from steering inputs ! The majority of our cars today are designed with front-wheel drive – it’s easy to package and it’s cheap. And I suppose most of these fairly low-powered cars re not driven anywhere near the limit. Unfortunately, a large percentage of our younger car buyers have never experienced a rear-wheel-drive car and have come to think that front-wheel spin and torque steer are what all cars do ! Another unfortunate factor in the fun takes is that marketing departments push for ever larger tire sizes, with the result that he limit of adhesion becomes very difficult to reach on a dry road and when it is reached the transition to problem time is very fast indeed ! For me as a driver there is nothing more satisfying than driving a well-balanced rear-drive car with really good steering feel. I suppose my ultimate car for this experience is my Lotus Elan which has sublime steering and about 52 percent of its weight on the rear axle. The Elan’s added bonus is that it sits on 155 wide tires, opening up the possibility of safe four-wheel drifts to all. A lightweight rear-drive spots car with great steering and the correct size of tires for its performance envelope is something I wish every sporting driver could – experience currently a Lotus Elise comes closest to achieving this set of deliverables. Unfortunately I’m a little too tall to fit in the Elise. Perhaps I should fit those 145 tires to my Smart Coupe, I’ll take the opportunity to apply a glowing Clean Plus® Tire Shine – an enthusiast I am and will be always.
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