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Dry Handling
It's arguably the most important aspect of a tyre's performance - but just what did our test reveal?
Over timed laps of the dry handling track at Uvalde, only fractions of a second separated the tyres. But from behind the wheel, the differences can be huge. The driving experiences revealed so much more than the time gaps between our top four.
Top-placed Bridgestone showed its F1 racing pedigree with
loads of grip, and allowed us to adjust the car mid-corner.
Continental really attacked the curves with great turn-in and change of direction, while Dunlop provided lots of grip, albeit without the precision of the previous two.
Rounding out the top four was Hankook. It let our Audi A3 move around more
than the best here, yet was progressive and easy to control. A few tenths down
was the Michelin, which had trouble holding the line on the power.
The big grooves of wet track stars Goodyear and Vredestein did not help on the dry tarmac – they were left near the bottom of the top 10, albeit less than a second behind our champ.
Pirelli struggled; it lacked
steering precision and the car moved round a lot, but its performance was
nowhere near as bad as the Wanli’s.
While the rest of the tyres lapped within one second of each other, the Chinese trailed by a further 1.5 seconds. It lacked grip, required plenty of lock and pushed wide each time we got on the throttle.
Finally,
Maxxis may have a dry road winner: its M36 was perfectly suited to the Texas
tarmac, and achieved the only sub-52-second lap time in our test.
