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 fractionsof a second separated the tyres. But from behind the wheel, the differences canbe huge. The driving experiences revealed so much more than the time gapsbetween our top four.
Top-placed Bridgestone showed its F1 racing pedigree withloads of grip, and allowed us to adjust the car mid-corner.
Continental really attacked the curves with great turn-in andchange of direction, while Dunlop provided lots of grip, albeit without theprecision of the previous two.
Rounding out the top four was Hankook. It let our Audi A3 move around morethan the best here, yet was progressive and easy to control. A few tenths downwas the Michelin, which had trouble holding the line on the power.
The big grooves of wet track stars Goodyear and Vredestein didnot 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 lackedsteering precision and the car moved round a lot, but its performance wasnowhere near as bad as the Wanli’s.
While the rest of the tyres lapped within one second of eachother, the Chinese trailed by a further 1.5 seconds. It lacked grip, requiredplenty 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 Texastarmac, and achieved the only sub-52-second lap time in our test.
| Dry handling results |
|---|
| Bridgestone 100.0 |
| Continental 99.9 |
| Dunlop 99.8 |
| hankook 99.7 |
| Michelin 99.3 |
| Kumho 99.2 |
| Goodyear 98.9 |
| Vredestein 98.7 |
| Fulda 98.5 |
| Pirelli 98.2 |
| Wanli 95.7 |
| Maxxis 100.2 |
