Andy Webster's question about alloy wheels led to tire width, which
reminded me of something.
My first LBC ('74 GAN5) came with the stock tires -- Michelin XZX, in
something like 145R-13, on Rostyles. I fell absolutely in LOVE with the
way the car went around corners. Having grown up in the Sixties, I'd
always read about cars that went around corners "as though they were on
rails, old bean!" And I'd had some pretty nimble, grippy little cars as
I was growing up, and had the chance in high school and college to drive
some fairly fast performance and "sporty" cars of my parents'.
The Midget was, and don't all nod your heads in unison or the earth will
be flung off its axis, a complete and utter revelation to me. Rails
were part of it; that steering, pleasant when parking, became as light
as thought the moment the car began moving. And direction changes at
speed, at almost any speed, were accomplished more or less by looking in
the direction you wanted to go; the pressure of the neck muscles on the
shoulders transmitted enough energy to the wheel that the car responded.
Because it was the mid-Eighties, however, I succumbed to the desire for
more grip. I ran 185-60 HR13 Pirelli P6s (when they were pretty hot
stuff!), and was both delighted and disappointed. Delighted, because
the car ceased to have any apparent cornering limits on my familiar
roads. It was as if someone had taken a few gallons of Blaze Red paint
and poured it at high speed on the pavement.
Disappointed, though... because the car lost that on-rails feeling. It
lost the lightness, the sense of *balance*, that the skinny,
old-fashioned tires provided. Sure, it felt like it had been welded to
a NASA centrifuge, so much so that the SUs would stumble from time to
time as the gas got sloshed up the sides of the float bowls, but it
never had that same delicacy. And I missed it.
Which is a long-winded way of explaining why the next GAN5 that's coming
to my house is going to arrive with 165-70 series tires on it -- enough
wider than the 145s to provide me with the grip to which a decade and a
half of autocrossing, SCCA road racing, and just plain insane street
driving have accustomed me, but with luck still narrow enough that the
sharpness of the older, skinny tires will still come through.
Any thoughts?
--Scott
|