Quote:
Originally Posted by GH85Carrera
Find me a race team anywhere driving on dry pavement that wants to go to a skinnier tire to increase speed. Good luck.
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No one said that. c'mon.... reductio ad absurdum.
Although, OTOH, I promise you that race teams have gone to skinnier tires. A tire can be too wide. On a race team tire choice is an optimization problem.
I once had some 550 rims. Those were 16 x 3.25"! But hey, 1200lb car! Would that 998 tire give that car more grip?
On that thought, I knew an old autocrosser that had much fatter (than OE) tires on his Beck replica... until Porsche used it for a Boxster commercial and put on some OE approximations (tall and skinny) - the autocrosser was stunned by the performance improvement. (kept 'em)
Ask yourself, Why would a 930 have such skinny tires up front? --Clearly a wider version of the same wheel tire was available at the time. Was it because they wanted worse braking, worse cornering... slow the car down? OR was it to balance the front/rear grip? --I will note that car makers typically do like to set up ROAD cars with a bit of understeer, but that can be achieved with inflation pressure differences and/or alignment) So why would a light nosed, heavy assed 930 have relative steam-rollers only in the back?
Typically the width of a tire increases with the load. (have you noticed how much heavier a modern car is?) There are other factors of course, influencing tire shape, like road type expected, suspension kinematics and dynamics, scrub radius and aero concerns, but again, tires are engineered/optimized wider (or narrower) so that they can carry appropriately sticky compound and not easily exceed the optimal temp.
For any tire as the cord length (F/R of the patch) grows so too does the heat put into the tire from the rolling component. (drive on a flat and see how hot that gets) The more heat from rolling means less abuse available for accelerations - this is the fundamental. Make the tire wider and the cord shrinks (cooler, from both less dynamic deflection and from more available surface area(heat shedding) - again, thermal management)
The optimization of tire width is much more complicated than even that fundamental, and a
looonnng ways away from the misguided tautology of "wider tires has more grip cuz wider is grippier." --that is simply not true.
hmmm... I suppose you could safely state,
wider can provide more grip, in that it's a longer lasting grip. But that would be equivocating on the word "more" to mean
longer lasting rather than the original usage of meaning
more static friction. 