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Tyres aren’t very easy to understand – all of them are black and round, and some cars have bigger ones than others. What’s the big deal about them? For one thing, your tyres are your car’s only contact with the road. And there are only four of them, so your car, which weighs around a ton, depends on four small patches of rubber to keep you going in the direction you want.
Tyres come in many sizes but only one shape (understandably) but the reason they are important is often neglected. The grip they offer is dependent on many different factors, which we shall explore in this section. The kind of tyre you choose for your vehicle will dictate its properties: choose a soft, grippy tyre and your acceleration and fuel efficiency will certainly drop. At the same time, your cornering grip will increase and you will stop in a much shorter distance during an emergency.
Good things never come cheap, though, so be prepared to pay more per tyre, and to replace them often. Tyres based heavily in favour of fuel efficiency usually have low friction, which means that cornering grip is low, and braking distances aren’t that great.
The other major reason for paying attention to your tyres is water. We live in a country where the fury of the monsoon is a given every year – and those designs you see on the tread are designed to drain that water from under the tyre as it rolls so that the tyre can reach the road underneath and grip. When you let your tyre go bald, it looks really nice, like a race car, but even race cars switch to tyres with grooves in the tread when it rains during a race. Then there are punctures: even if one of your tyres loses air, your car will become nearly impossible to control.
Tyres may not be high on your list of priorities, but they are your only contact with the ground – so take good care of them.
