New tyres - which end?

[7db]

GravelBen said:

7db said:

Your car manufacturer has spent ages ensuring that your car is an understeer-characteristic car (by which I mean the steering angle required is greater than the d'Alembertian angle, rather than that it ploughs on into the hedge when you drive a corner too fast). Isn't the risk that by increasing the grip at the front you create an oversteer-characteristic car?

Are you creating an oversteer-characteristic car, or just reducing the severity of the understeer-characteristic? Surely the stronger the understeer-characteristic the more extreme a change will be needed to return it to neutral, and beyond that to oversteer tendency.

I don't know. That would depend on the balance created. You'd have to go and drive a banked road and measure the effect. I recall one of our regular posters here investigating a car with lowered suspension for which exactly this had happened.

Chances are that if both front and rear sets are road legal then in extremis you'd just be looking at pinwheeling into the outside of the bend.

[Deva Link]

davepoth said:

Look in your car's manual, it will tell you to rotate the tyres from back to front when you get new tyres. You never need to replace 4 at the same time.

Mercedes wrote in the some of their manuals (ir was in the latest C Class manual for a while) that their ESP is so good if you have to fit a pair of tyres only then you might as well put them on the front.