Cars / All things automotive

Super-sticky tires are ruining the real joy of driving, and one car truly shows why.

by Jim Resnick – Sep 22, two thousand fifteen 12:00 pm UTC

Today we are downright and continuously bombarded by numbers—from near and far, in our work and even in our games. But if you deconstruct one particular human-machine interface, numbers mean nothing.

Supremely high levels of grip from tires on sports cars do no favors for your driving pleasure or the joyful mastery of a challenging, twisty road. In fact, they do fairly the opposite. Super-high-grip tires mask mechanical communication. For the non-expert enthusiast driver without an Andretti level of skill, such rubber can often be unforgiving and unapproachable. Super grippy tires can make the capability to kittle the car’s natural limit of adhesion out of reach.

The real shame is that this is the exact point where enthused driving becomes a dance worthy of the effort. A sports car can be as rewarding a playmate as Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers, but fit horrendously grippy sneakers, and grace falls vapid on its culo. Put simply, tires and suspension engineered for maximum possible grip supply what they’re supposed to, but in inverse proportion to joy. And just to prove that this is not totally out of sync with today’s expectations, the poster boy for this notion just underwent a accomplish redesign that’s wholly loyal to improving human-machine communication and moderate grip: the two thousand sixteen Mazda MX-5 Miata.

Grip in the form of lateral acceleration and breakaway character is the prime offender in the modern crimes against driving joy, and it’s typically measured by the force of gravity in a lateral plane. In this metric, a car that can most quickly negotiate a 100-, 200- or 300-foot (30/60/90m) diameter skidpad in steady-state cornering in the least amount of time against others posts the highest grip.

Of course, grip on a skidpad proves only one thing: that tires stick well and the suspension keeps them mostly upright. That’s not where the joy or art of driving live, however. Better grip may mean negotiating a sustained corner quicker, but if you concentrate only on grip in the chassis engineering phase, the enjoyment of driving plummets. The breakaway character of the car’s and tires’ cornering capability at maximum adhesion becomes unforgiving and hard to read for many drivers.

Many disparate compels act on car manufacturers as they develop fresh model lines and model variants. Principal among them are tangible differentiators against competition. Winning the hearts and minds of sporty car fans often relies on a game of numbers brewed in a cauldron of 0-60 mph times, quarter-mile figures, maximum grip numbers, lap times, and nutso horsepower. Living by those stats adds up to one-upmanship that eventually leads down a rabbit crevice of irrelevance. Mix all those ingredients together and you get an automotive Dolph Lundgren—great on paper but lacking any real charm in person. To put it another way, when is the last time you drove a spec table? I’ve tested well over 1,000 cars, and I can honestly reaction this question with “never.”

The Miata proves there’s a better recipe. Mix in the touchy-feely feedback of communicative steering, light weight, equal fore-aft weight balance, and a low polar moment of inertia. Cook up a suspension absorbent enough to keep tires planted and talking to the driver as continuously as possible. Throw in seats that tell the pilot what’s happening at the chassis level. Stir. You’ll have the most pleasing automotive meal you’ve ever eaten rather than the numbers-driven cup of twigs and bark served up by the max-power, max-grip, brick suspension car kitchen. And here’s the art part: you can’t simply wave a magic wand and have all these elements come to life in metal and rubber. It takes heady fortitude and philosophical strength of principles (human-machine communication) to find the sweet spot. This is where things usually fall down, but the fresh Miata is one car that stands tall in this equilibrium. (And for those keeping track, Mazda has done this for more than two decades.)

It’s worth noting there are a few other holdouts besides the Miata today. Mini Coopers suggest driving joy without much homework. Ford’s brilliant Fiesta ST and Concentrate ST and the Subaru/Scion BRZ/FR-S twins are all glad road puppies. And the brilliant fresh Ford Mustang redefines what a brawny muscle car can feel like. But i nspired by classic British sports cars, the Miata’s foot purpose since one thousand nine hundred ninety has been satisfying feedback, lightweight agility, and most of all, driving joy. This year’s edition has deconstructed sports car philosophy to these most nude and best necessities, delivering what you want as well or better than every previous iteration. It qualifies as a minor miracle in today’s car-building climate, where the shove for autonomous driving capabilities rages at the periphery.

The origin of grip zeal

To understand today’s excessive fascination with grip, it helps to recall a time when the drivers were fat and the tires were skinny. Go back sixty years or so and British roadsters with modest power and meager tire grip awoke a sleeping American sports car market. Ultimate cornering grip was fairly low, and this was as much a function of vehicle weight (where lighter meant grippier) as it was keeping tire treads in the same plane as the road surface (which was difficult due to downright aggro suspension technology and geometry).

As the automotive world returned from war materiel to car production in the late 1940s, most cars on the American road used rudimentary chassis bits: drum brakes all around, live rear axles on leaf springs (which did dual duty as both springing and locating devices), high-sidewall tires with very pliable bias-ply construction, and suspension generally focused on delivering whipped fluid rail quality. Steering and treating were things you simply suffered. On a good day, the average car of the late 1940s could generate perhaps 0.Four or 0.Five gs of cornering force. Sports cars of the era weighed about half that of an American sedan and required proactive, repeated maintenance. Still, these old sports cars suggested downright approachable dynamics and more driving joy and escapade than your own private pony, much like the modern Miata. (Today, sedans can achieve twice that amount of grip, come back twice the fuel economy, release negligible emissions, and avoid ejecting you in a crash.)

But time is nature’s engineer. Technical developments and growth in grip and spectacle in general has become the game rather than a jaunty, kerchief-flowing rail through the countryside. Spectacle figures improved, grip escalated, and bench racing—car nerds arguing over rival models’ speed—ascended. Nowadays we’ve somehow gone wrong and fallen in love with loveless numbers. We’ve strayed from what ties us—enjoying and perhaps conquering challenging roads—to worshipping at the altar of numbers that provide little automotive enlightenment.

Car talk: The language behind the metal

Despite the obsession with numbers, cars remain devices of analog communication. For the purpose of perceiving and communicating cornering force to the driver, any vehicle proceeds to produce information today in several ways, and Miatas have always excelled in these areas:

• Bod roll: A primary, fundamental way to inform the driver about cornering and therefore a progressive indicator of grip. However, on low-friction surfaces (water or moist leaves, sand, pebbles, etc.), tires lose grip with far less figure roll than the driver might anticipate if conditions were dry.
• Yaw: The car’s rotation or rate of switch in rotation relative to the switch in actual direction. An oversteering car generates yaw, but at any one moment during that slide, not necessarily a switch in direction.
• Steering effort and weight: As cornering compels build, steering should build up weight and require more effort. As the thresholds of adhesion treatment and begin to fall off, steering should lighten, providing the very first and primary indication to the driver that grip is diminishing and a switch in driving treatment should be considered.
• Tire noise: A singing tire is a glad tire. A screeching tire is not. Make your tires sing.
• The seat (and therefore, your butt): Fine drivers develop very sensitive gluteus maximi. Great-driving cars speak to those glutei before stuff gets ugly.
• Vision: This actually comes last in this list. When driving aggressively, vision must feed your planning for the instant future, not your present tense. Once a skid starts, you obviously see it, but by that time, it’s likely too late to prevent it.

These characters are what create the pleasure, directness, and responsiveness that a decent sports car provides its driver. The joy comes in the mother tongue of feel, tactility, and unspoiled communication. A car speaks to you through steering feedback and in the way it moves about on the road—the anti-numbers.

While genuine numbers absolutely play the central role in real racing, how many enthusiasts who participate in open track days actually contest via lap times? It’s a minority. If you’ve ever done a lap with a pro, you certainly reminisce speed, but memory is relative. You keep coming back when you master it, not when you crash because of it.

In fact, an obsession with numbers and grip has from time to time resulted in a serious affront to the joy and pleasure of driving. The religion of grip gave us the one thousand nine hundred eighty four Z51 Corvette, a car that could achieve a remarkable, world-beating 0.90 g cornering force on a skidpad. This figure was widely accepted as a very first by a street car. But actually living with that Corvette on anything but glass-smooth tarmac was a teeth-gnashing, kidney-punching, practice similar to nine rounds with Roberto Duran. Chevrolet quickly rethought the car’s suspension tuning.

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