Have you ever wondered how your driving would fare if you put high performance tyres on your car? The truth might surprise you! High performance tyres are great at their specialist purpose, but that does not necessarily translate into good driving on public roads. Let us take a look.
Often physically different from regular tyres, modern high-performance tyres are noticeable for their low profile sidewalls and greater width. This ensures greater stability at high speeds and the tyres are engineered for maximum speeds and cornering. The tread on a performance tyre is often barely legal, or well below the legal limit of 1.6mm. This, again, is for increased speed, but does not translate well to the highways where you will be a danger to other road users, yourself, and you will be at risk of getting into legal trouble besides! For this reason alone, it is probably best to keep high-performance tyres on the race track!
Looking at the engineering of a racing tyre, that low-profile sidewall demands a larger wheel, making the change from regular to high-performance a rather expensive one as wheels are not cheap in their own right. In the tyre itself, high-performance tyres can be quite innovative, using ever lighter compounds of polymers that lighten the load on the racing engine without sacrificing strength. Racing tyres are often filled with nitrogen rather than air. It is an inert gas, and thus does not react with any of the tyre components, and it is also very cooling, keeping the tyre’s temperature down. Finally, performance tyres are not designed for longevity. Like ballerina’s delicate shoes they are expected to enhance performance for as long as they last (not very long at all) before being readily replaced.
Regular tyres, on the other hand, are less extreme and much safer when it comes to driving in public on regular highways and city streets. This is not to say they share nothing with performance tyres – on the contrary, as new ways of making tyres, new materials are tested, and innovations are explored, and found to be good, these are incorporated into regular tyres to offer drivers a hint of the race track’s excitement without sacrificing any of their safety.
Returning to engineering, regular tyres have radials made from heavy steel which are strong and sturdy, their weight not really being considered important for vehicles that are not in the racing industry. Regular tyres, too, are designed to be used for hundreds and hundreds of hours, maintaining the same good quality and user experience from start to finish. And finally, regular tyres are, of course, filled with air, making them easy to maintain and top up at any service station without a great outlay of cash.
So you can see that regular tyres are great for day-to-day driving, and that high-performance tyres do have a purposeful edge when it comes to speed and breaking racing records! If you are looking for performance tyres Birmingham has many outlets where you can compare regular and high-performance tyres and get great deals on performance tyres. One recommendation would be to shop high Performance Tyres in Birmingham online at Plume Tyres. Available at competitive prices!
