TeamD Adventures

Tires are amazing things.  They are the most direct conduit between the car and the world.  They are the link between potential and realized acceleration.  They apply the horsepower to the earth and grab the ground just as hard to stop us from landing in ditches.  Good tires maximize the performance of a car and bad ones can make a Ferrari handle like a Fujian.

We here at TeamD are big believers in quality tires.  Our "official" tire for winter is the Nokian Hakkapeliitta (seen in many different flavors, mostly studded) and on the summer rallies you will see our cars shod with competition gravel tires by Michelin, Silverstone, etc.

The rest of the year, I tend toward an All Season tire.  I don’t want to run the studded snow tires any more than I need to and with the variable Seattle weather a dedicated summer tire can seem like folly at times.

After the extremely disapointing stock tires died under mysterious circumstances (a Leatherman blade was found embedded in the sidewall) I replaced them first with what was available at the scene of the crime (Michelin MXV4’s I think) and then with a new set of Michelin Pilot Sport AS tires.

While I liked the grippyness of the tire and they did fine in the wet, I was never impressed with their straight-line tracking or their road noise, both of which have gotten worse over time.  When I pulled them off to make room for the winter tires before Totem, I noticed significant “chunking” on the edges (I define chunking as bits of the rubber falling off or threatening to fall off in chunks).  Although the tread was still intact the shallower features were almost worn flat.  It was time to consider retiring them for new rubber.

So began the research.  I consulted others, around Aberdeen just this last weekend, where bizarre weather ruled the weekend and I was wishing I had waited one more week to change out of the studs.

Still, the new tires are nice and quiet, did a great job on both the snow and the gravel (I was working finish HAM but I was able to drive the course out to my position and give the tires a workout),

If you only saw the results from NOBM 2009, you might have jumped to a reasonable conclusion: The overall winners ran a clean, consistent, just-a-shade-better rally than the rest. Oh, hell, instead of spinning this tale out, I’ll just relate what they said:

We’d run wide in a right-hander. In fact, we might have gone off, except for a banked cuve of earth hugging the outside of the turn. Since we’d been driving on these roads for hours, it seemed natural to just drive on the banking around the turn. It worked great. And then the black car streaked past us on the inside line; it was a good twenty feet away, given our position on the outside, so it was a clean pass. But then it was gone.

That was the hurtling Bad Dog, catching up to the safety of the 21 & 1/2 minute time slot.

Up early Sunday to check the Saab: no flats, started OK. nice&shiny RX-7. Before you suspect that the rallymaster let the fools rush in where angels fear to tread, note that his was the nicer of the Jags. He wasn’t tip-toeing. So the 500’s a mystery to me.

Yesterday the terrain got flatter, traffic heavier as we approached Dawson Creek. Then the awards banquet and it will be time to go home.

Last Sunday we drove up to Olympia to participate in the 28th Annual Corvettes de Olympia. During the rally we covered some of the paved transit areas from NOBM 2006. In the end we drove home to Portland feeling like we’d improved our sign reading ability and had fun to boot.