"Wrong Wheel Drive (41%)" (rduncan5678)
01/24/2016 at 06:53 • Filed to: None
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"Wrong Wheel Drive (41%)" (rduncan5678)
01/24/2016 at 06:53 • Filed to: None | 0
| 12 |
No, this is not yet another post about snow tires and how you are wrong if you don’t use them in the winter. I’m not gonna get into that debate. This is just a funny story from this weekend.
So the place I’m staying at in Vermont has a steep driveway out to the roadway. Last time I came up, my one friend with a Lincoln Town car struggled to get up the hill but ended up being able to easily reverse out. I on the other hand had absolutely no trouble in my Miata and got up with one attempt and minimal tire slip.
This weekend the hostel I’m staying at was completely booked so there were a variety of people staying here. One guy came with his Infiniti G37 and all season tires. When he tried to go out to dinner, he could barely move on the level parts of the parking lot much less the hill part. He was so stranded that he actually got a tow truck in the morning!
Now I just find this story hilarious. Everyone else in the parking lot had AWD or FWD and had minimal trouble getting out. I of course had zero trouble yet again. But it’s not just the snow tires, having a manual and limited slip helps a ton in maintaining traction in that situation. But that guy in the G37 was just totally unprepared. When I asked him why he would come up to a place like Vermont without either snow tires or 4WD, he said “I didn’t think it would be this snowy”. It’s Vermont!! Of course it snows there..
Anyways, bringing the right tool for the job is always important. I presume his all season tires were higher performance ones that were not M+S rated and I sure hope he made it home alive. Since he left into the blizzard yesterday.
Jarrett - [BRZ Boi]
> Wrong Wheel Drive (41%)
01/24/2016 at 07:08 |
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So what you’re saying, is that if I go find a LSD in a scrap yard for the Miata, I can use it as my winter warrior?
Flavien Vidal
> Wrong Wheel Drive (41%)
01/24/2016 at 07:27 |
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Only thing I can tell him...
Tires... it’s JUST tires... (manual transmission does help, I wouldn’t have been able to do what I did in the corvette with an automatic, but I didn’t have a LSD in my mustang at first and did just fine. And by fine, I mean Montreal fine... If you survive montreal, the rest is a piece of cake :) )
That's gonna leave a mark!
> Wrong Wheel Drive (41%)
01/24/2016 at 08:32 |
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He was the tool but it was the wrong job.
Needmoargarage
> Jarrett - [BRZ Boi]
01/24/2016 at 08:47 |
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I use a Miata with an open diff (with snows) as my winter warrior in MI. It’s awesome!
deekster_caddy
> Wrong Wheel Drive (41%)
01/24/2016 at 09:34 |
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It’s not so much that snow tires are superior in the snow, but that summer tires are NOT supposed to be used in the snow ;)
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Wrong Wheel Drive (41%)
> Jarrett - [BRZ Boi]
01/24/2016 at 19:42 |
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I mean it certainly would help. Plus donuts are a ton easier to accomplish!
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Wrong Wheel Drive (41%)
> Needmoargarage
01/24/2016 at 19:44 |
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Good, I'm glad I'm not the only crazy one. I drove top down to the ski mountain. Fellow logdgers thought I was nuts haha
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Wrong Wheel Drive (41%)
> deekster_caddy
01/24/2016 at 19:45 |
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I mean they were definitely all season tires but they had to have either been quite bald or high performance.
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Wrong Wheel Drive (41%)
> Flavien Vidal
01/24/2016 at 19:47 |
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Seeing this makes me happy. Too many people put their nice cars away for winter. Sure salt can ruin the car but I consider a car ruined if it isn't driven regularly. Washing my car in the winter is fun anyways, the difference between clean and dirty is so much more of a change.
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Flavien Vidal
> Wrong Wheel Drive (41%)
01/24/2016 at 20:31 |
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You will like this then ;)
http://oppositelock.kinja.com/living-with-a-…
I chose the Corvette for a specific reason too though: body won’t rust ;)
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Wrong Wheel Drive (41%)
> Flavien Vidal
01/25/2016 at 20:57 |
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Idk why you say 50/50 distribution is bad in the winter though. I would never put extra weight to throw off the balance in my Miata. Sure it could give me extra starting traction but it would certainly make handling less predictable. The even weight distribution makes the slides controllable and therfore fun!
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Flavien Vidal
> Wrong Wheel Drive (41%)
01/25/2016 at 21:26 |
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NA and NB Miata don’t have a 50/50 weight distribution, despite what has been told by Mazda when they came out. 52/48 is closer to the truth ;)
The NC and the ND are the only ones with a real 50/50 weight ditribution. Same goes with the FC RX7, I’m driving in the video. The NA version was very close to a 50/50 weight distribution, but not the turbo.
50/50 is also fine as long as you don’t end up on pure ice and have some kind of traction, when braking and accelerating do actually transfert mass to the front or to the rear properly. But hitting some flat ice or anything with almost no traction at all, you would quickly notice the problems created by 4 wheel understeer...
So in general, a bit more weight in the rear while in the snow improves traction. Of course, in case of a crash I would just have to hope that my seat could cope with 80lbs of salt running into them lol. The Corvette was just a lot less predictable without them, and the difficulties my tires had to find traction, non-existant weight transfert on certain surfaces (when it’s -10 or -15 all the time, you constantly drive on ice in MTL) and the perfect 50/50 weight distribution just did not help.
I want another Corvette though... But I want a C5Z now :D