tire rotation

[tiAn@usiw.net (Christian Els)]

I'm a lot late replying to this thread, sorry of this has been debated to
death already.

A friend of mine is a former Dunlop tire engineer and currently a courtroom
forensic engineer (he does the mechanical analysis and presentation of what
happened and how in an accident to determine fault or liability -- neat
stuff). He will argue until he is blue in the face that no matter which
wheels are driven, to maintain the best control of your car always put the
tires with the best tread on the rear of the vehicle.

What Shawn <says that I snipped below> is true for a competition environment
where you are hunting the last 10th of a second, but for everyday driving I
have been convinced by my friend that he is correct.

The reasoning behind his stance is that if your front tires slip, whether
because you over power them, over load them (high cornering force) or
because they have inadequate grip on wet of frozen surfaces, the car will
always fail by sliding in the direction it is currently moving.

If the rear tires slip for any reason, the car is going to tend to rotate
based on several factors including front grip, direction front wheels are
pointed, cornering/acceleration/braking loads and surface angle. This
rapidly makes for a hugely difficult vehicle to control, having to determine
what each of those (plus other) factors are and adjust accordingly.

Granted the failure mode of lost front traction (sliding straight forward)
isn't always ideal (like when there's a cliff right there), but in most
circumstances the result is less damage, less likelihood of overturning and
lower impact speed.

Test this out yourself in an empty, wet parking lot sometime, you might be
surprised to see there is truth to this. I was skeptical, having a largely
front-drive back ground, but even on my GTI I was able to demonstrate to
myself pretty easily that this is true.

More along the lines of the original thread, my friend also recommends
initial tire rotation at 2500 and 5k miles, then every 7500 afterward for
the life of the tire.

Cheers,

Christian Els
1987 16V


----- Original Message -----
From: "Shawn C Meze" <skerocdriver@juno.com>
Subject: Re: tire rotation


> FWD the meaty tires go up front.
> RWD the meaty tires go in the rear.