Want to go faster? get better tyres

The age old debate about how to go faster has been on going since people started racing their cars. Most guys would think that having more power would naturally mean the ability to go faster. there is some truth in that but there is a condition attached to that statement. If there is more power and you are able to put it all down to the road effectively then you will go faster, however if your car has much better tyres but not as much power you can still be able to keep up or be faster than a car that has much more power. Many people may beg to disagree with me on this but without the ability to effectively put the power down the extra power is wasted. the tyres are the only contact your car has with the road and if there is insufficient traction the car isn't going anywhere!

Better tyres mean faster cornering speeds which leads to higher corner exit speed and the ability to reach the top speed sooner. On a car that has inferior tyres but higher engine power the car would have lower cornering speed and corner exit speed meaning that it would have to work harder to accelerate to catch the car with the higher corner exit speed. Like in Formula One you can naturally see that the cars that just came out of a tyre change with fresh tyres, when the tyres are up to temperature the speed of the car is much greater than before it went into the pit to change tyres. The lap times were very obvious and in many cases it can be as much as 2 seconds a lap difference.

Most guys are too wrapped up about engine power and making more power. It would be highly frustrating to drive a car with a tonne of power but no grip. The  car would be sliding all over the place and struggling in each turn. Watching lower powered cars passing you would be no fun! Cars like the Mazda Mx-5 is able to keep up with many more powerful cars is because it is gentle on its tyres due to its light weight body plus it is cheap to buy very good tyres for the MX-5 compared to much more powerful cars which have much larger tyres.

the moral of the story is to save up money to buy good tyres if you want to be fast. Forget about spending a lot of money for engine power.