alfadriver said:
ProDarwin said:
Knurled. said:
In reply to frenchyd :
The nice thing about when it gets really cold is that ice gets grippy, which is kind of an odd thing on the face of it.
Yes there is a point where the pressure of your car on the ice is not enough to compress it into water and you will actually have a lot of grip.
I hope to never experience this temperature.
If it ever does, hope that you drive on hard snow pack instead of ice. It's a lot "stickier' than ice is. Makes walking almost like walking on packed salt.
And it sounds like you're walking on packing peanuts.
That was my first clue that it was berking cold: the sound of the snow gets higher pitched. The second clue was that I needed two shoulders to steer my car because the fluid in the rack had turned to sticky jelly. The car had manual steering...
I live in Houston. If it snows, a rare event, I stay home and wait until it melts. Same for frozen rain.
Continental says that Extreme Contact sports should not be driven upon below 45 deg F. And that they could crack if driven upon below freezing. They say that by 20 degrees F even being outside with air pressure in them could cause them to crack. I don't want to test this so I have an extra set of wheels with regular tires.
In reply to jharry3 :
That's no joke. Somewhere in the barren wastes of the Internet are photos someone took of his rally car on the trailer at a should-be-a-winter-rally when an unexpected cold snap hit, and the sidewalls of his rally tires were cracked and broken into glass-like shards where the car's weight was resting on them overnight.
(I drove on Michelin gravel rally tires on the street one winter, just to move the car. Oddly enough, tire compounds meant to work over 80F, with big fat tread blocks that have no sipes, really really suck when it is cold)
Summer tires cracking in the cold definitely can happen. I've never run my set of ECS below freezing, but I've run them right down to it. They're definitely fine at that temp. The "don't drive below 45*" warning is generically applied to pretty much all summer tires as a safety for them having less grip at low temps. And some are pretty much hockey pucks by the time it gets down to freezing. The ECS give up a little grip at that temp (and most of it comes back as they warm up), but they're far from hockey pucks. And even driving on the street they'll warm up at that temp.
