Scirocco Central

I currently have 19" Lugano's on my car, would it screw the car up totally if i went down to 16" with winter tyres? looking at these to get me by for a few months.

http://tyremen.myshopify.com/products/v ... diamondevo" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

AlexM wrote:I currently have 19" Lugano's on my car, would it screw the car up totally if i went down to 16" with winter tyres? looking at these to get me by for a few months.

http://tyremen.myshopify.com/products/v ... diamondevo" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Alex

as long as you have the same rolling radius you will be fine, it is when you change the rolling radius that your speedo will begin reading out. check out the tyre calculators in the mod squad section to get a grasp of it & understand the effects of changing the rolling radius

S

trix wrote:

AlexM wrote:I currently have 19" Lugano's on my car, would it screw the car up totally if i went down to 16" with winter tyres? looking at these to get me by for a few months.

http://tyremen.myshopify.com/products/v ... diamondevo" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Alex

as long as you have the same rolling radius you will be fine, it is when you change the rolling radius that your speedo will begin reading out. check out the tyre calculators in the mod squad section to get a grasp of it & understand the effects of changing the rolling radius

S

Thanks Trix, i put into the calculator 205*60*16 and it said .82% so that should be pretty safe then? at 70MPH it only increased by .5MPH.

You also have to look at if it will clear the brake calliper and disc - I opted for 215/50/17

Me and my car were defeated by the snow today or rather we were defeated by the gridlock caused by the snow. 3 hours to go eight miles before I abandoned the car in a car park in Bothwell and walked the remaining 4 miles home. Glad I'm home though as there are reports of people being stuck on the roads for 8, 9 and even 10 hours!!

yellowplum wrote:M+S Tyres are Winter tyres

Edit: Nevermind. I haz confusion. The fact still remains, though, that the M+S doesn't really guarantee anything.

Crossbone wrote:That's exactly the kind of road where one should drive 'like one would drive a car with winter tires, passing cars in traffic, laughing at their puny summer tires which couldn't handle the small amounts of snow on the roads"!!! The laws of physics are dead. Long live the Formula 1 driver!

Are you denying that there is a huge performance difference between winter and summer tyres in snowy conditions?

Just out of curiosity, did the new car have anything else than M+S written on its tires?

Good question and got me wondering. After doing a bit of googling it seems that you can put M+S, M/S, the words Mud and Snow etc. on a tyre and it classifies as a winter tyre. The catch is that there are no tests or regulations to make sure the tyre actually suits winter conditions! The result is that the M+S is no quality certificate, it just tells you what the manufacturer wants to sell as a winter tyre. For example in the U.S. so called "all season" (read: no season) tyres have M+S written on the side and similar tyres can also be sold in Europe.

So, the new car also had M+S written on its tyres, but since my uncle didn't continue the story with how they almost died on the way back, I would assume the tyres were of better quality than the first ones.

So don't even imagine for one second that you will find a German driving on summer tires in a skiing resort (foreign tourists and rental cars excluded) - mind you, winter tires are mandatory by law in this regions during winter months.

Did I say anyone in the skiing resort had summer tyres? They passed cars with summer tyres (or otherwise overly cautious drivers) on the way to the Alps ie. on mundane motorways in Southern Germany. Of course, German law stipulates that you should use tyres that fit the weather, so even in Sothern Germany they should be prepared to switch to winter tyres. However, this was more or less the way the story was told to me.

On a slightly different note, has anyone noticed that the rear parking sensors can be completely rubbish at spotting large piles of snow? One minute it's not beeping at all and the next it's screaming at you to stop.

I can recall the sensors on my old Scirocco were the same last winter, so wondered if there's a scientific reason for them sometimes being fooled by snow?

andyd68 wrote:Me and my car were defeated by the snow today or rather we were defeated by the gridlock caused by the snow. 3 hours to go eight miles before I abandoned the car in a car park in Bothwell and walked the remaining 4 miles home. Glad I'm home though as there are reports of people being stuck on the roads for 8, 9 and even 10 hours!!

similar nightmare to you, 4 hours from Glasgow city centre to Paisley, had to walk the last 2 miles, now need to go see if it's still there, some ned has probably set fire to it by now

AlexM wrote: similar nightmare to you, 4 hours from Glasgow city centre to Paisley, had to walk the last 2 miles, now need to go see if it's still there, some ned has probably set fire to it by now

Mine was stll there when I went back to retrieve it earlier Now back in my driveway. Roads round here still pretty bad with a mixture of tarmac, hard packed snow, icey ruts and adandoned vehicles. I reckon it will be at the earliest Thursday before they get the roads back to some sort of normality. I can feel another duvet day for tomorrow

andyd68 wrote:

AlexM wrote: similar nightmare to you, 4 hours from Glasgow city centre to Paisley, had to walk the last 2 miles, now need to go see if it's still there, some ned has probably set fire to it by now

Mine was stll there when I went back to retrieve it earlier Now back in my driveway. Roads round here still pretty bad with a mixture of tarmac, hard packed snow, icey ruts and adandoned vehicles. I reckon it will be at the earliest Thursday before they get the roads back to some sort of normality. I can feel another duvet day for tomorrow

Thankfully got mine back in one piece, took 3 people to get me moving though. haven't seen a gritter out in days. thankfully i can work from home so no plans to go back into the office this week.

RoccoScientist wrote:

Crossbone wrote:That's exactly the kind of road where one should drive 'like one would drive a car with winter tires, passing cars in traffic, laughing at their puny summer tires which couldn't handle the small amounts of snow on the roads"!!! The laws of physics are dead. Long live the Formula 1 driver!

Are you denying that there is a huge performance difference between winter and summer tyres in snowy conditions?

Why would I be doing that since I've been using winter tires on all my cars in the past 7 years???
I was saying it's not safe for you and for other drivers on the road to think that once you have winter tires fitted, you can ignore the fact that any car driven on snow doesn't have the same grip as on tarmac.
Do you think you can't spin off a snowy road if you don't drive carefully just because you have winter tires?! Physics still apply!

Sensible Driving even with Winter Tyres

Crossbone wrote:I was saying it's not safe for you and for other drivers on the road to think that once you have winter tires fitted, you can ignore the fact that any car driven on snow doesn't have the same grip as on tarmac.

Well, d'uh. I never claimed anyone had ignored that fact. My uncle has been driving in snowy conditions every winter for decades and even I have been driving on winter (snow) tyres every year for more than a decade. So rest assured, both me and my uncle know how to drive safely during winter - and I'm talking about proper winter, not the "it snows maybe twice in January, if we're unlucky"-kind. Now, what I originally said was:

"During the trip to the Alps they had driven like one would drive a car with winter tyres, passing cars in traffic, laughing at their puny summer tyres which couldn't handle the small amounts of snow on the roads."

"Driven like one would drive a car with winter tyres" doesn't mean they we're trying to get themselves and all others killed. It means that they maintained a safe travel speed considering both the road and weather conditions, relying on both decades of winter driving experience and what the car (I believe it was an Opel Zafira) was communicating through the wheels. It just so happened that this safe travel speed was higher than that of several others on the road, who either had summer tyres or just were not used to driving in snowy conditions. Of course, they later found out that the tyres weren't fit for the Alps, but this doesn't mean their trip through Southern Germany was some sort of death defying feat.

demonstration of what happens when u fit only 2 winter tyres on to a FWD car.

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i have just ordered some continentals and quite cheesed off with myself for not doing so in november or october, when they were some 50 quid or more cheaper.

but i only took 2 tyres for the front axle. could i buy cheaper winters for the rear axle? buying all 4 continentals would be too expensive.

Be very careful of thinking of only placing 2 winter tyres on your vehicle. Firstly for safety reasons as demonstrated in the video above and secondly your insurance company may find various exclusions to apply to your policy and you may be worse of than if you didn't change them at all.

If you want to change to Winter Tyres it has been mentioned above, invest in either a set of steel wheels or cheaper alloys. It should cost anything between £400 - £800 depending on what you select for both tyres and alloys/steels. Replacing them on the Rocs alloys will only cost you more in the long term.

Also try ATS Euromaster, strangely enough I obtained mine from them and it was cheaper than our usual place (ordering them from Germany) - they have 25% off Dunlop, Micheline, and Avon (if they can get any for you).

http://www.atseuromaster.co.uk/retail-c ... ltibuy.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;