Your
tires are the most important part of your car. They can make you
faster, they can save your life, or they can get you killed, even if
you’re the star of a major car-centric action franchise, and even if you
aren’t driving. (Spoiler alert: the driver dies too).
Considering
how important tires are, they aren’t given nearly enough credit in the
media or in car-guy circles. Sure, every racer talks about tires, and a
lot of canyon warriors will sit on top of the snake talking setup, but
on the internet and in casual conversation with casual enthusiasts,
tires are a dull topic. You certainly can’t brag about them on a forum
the way you can with your upgraded turbo and fresh dyno chart. You have
to go into the Grassroots Motorsports catalog, or to a very specific
sub-genre to see a tire comparison test for your desired application, so
most people just end up reading reviews on TireRack.
Tires
are a dull topic even when we’re actively shopping for tires. They have
insanely complicated naming schemes like GoodRubber GoodGripper Pro
XGV25, which makes them even harder to discuss than Infiniti’s current
lineup. In all seriousness, I have a set of tires on my Mustang at the
moment called “Continental ContiForce Contact.” That’s a real name under
which a real set of tires is marketed. Most people don’t have the
luxury of actually testing tires before they buy either, making
decisions based on either anecdotal evidence, a roll of the dice,
budget, or a combination of the three.
Nevertheless,
the four small patches of rubber connecting your two-ton manslaughter
machine to your city’s lowest-priced asphalt are, if you ask me, the
best way to improve your car, or, the quickest way to fuck it up, crash,
and even die. Even if you should know better. And I’m going to give you
one piece of advice—advice I learned the hard way, but not as hard as
my friends Paul Walker—who would have celebrated his 43rd birthday this
week—and Roger Rodas did.
In
November of 2012, I entered my modified C5 Corvette in the “Optima
Batteries Ultimate Street Car Invitational,” a multi-discipline driving
event held the day after SEMA ends in Las Vegas.
[Disclaimer: I have done promotional work at events for Optima Batteries unrelated to this event or to my column at The Drive.]
I
could not have been less prepared for this event if I had left the
car’s targa roof at home in the garage, which, by the way, I did. Think
it never rains in Vegas? Never snows? Go there in a car without a roof. I
guarantee both will happen.
Though
the car was, and is, in mostly good nick, with, at the time, around
25,000 miles on it. The engine makes 400 horsepower to the wheels with
some mild bolt-on upgrades, and it has a Stoptech Big Brake kit, Pfadt
coilover suspension, racing seats, harnesses, and more. All of it
worked.
The
bad news? It also had six-year old Goodyear F1 Assymetric tires on it.
They had less than 5,000 miles on them, so they looked nearly new. But
looking new and gripping like new are two different propositions
entirely.
A tire, for those as unfamiliar with this concept as I was back then, does two things: it sticks to the road by nature of its rubber chemical compound, and it disperses water using the tread pattern cut into the tire.
On
a street tire, most people will notice their tread has worn down after
several thousand miles of use and decide it’s time to get new tires. If
it rains, the worn tread won’t disperse water as well and you will have
poor wet-weather performance, and a tendency towards hydroplaning. With
cars driven frequently, you will wear out your tread before you age-out
your rubber, which is the problem I want to address.
With
collector cars, especially cars driven less than a few thousand miles a
year, the problem is that while your tread may look good, the rubber is
old and dry, and simply will not work properly. The chemical compounds
in your tires will degrade over time, significantly reducing your
available grip, or worse, blowing out a sidewall under load.
With
sport tires, colder weather and harsh weather will exacerbate this. In
general, five years from date of manufacture (stamped on the tire) is
about as old as you ever want to go in a car you plan to drive quickly.
If that car (or the tires themselves) are stored in a climate-controlled
facility under perfect conditions, maybe you could squeeze an extra
year or two out of them. But the fact is, if you have a few cars, some
maybe that you only drive a few times a year, replacing tires can easily
become a dangerous afterthought.
Which
brings me back to Las Vegas on a chilly November morning. I arrive in
the paddock at Spring Mountain to find out that, as usual, every other
person at the track has taken this event much more seriously than I
have. Most have prepped their cars specifically for this event, whereas I
have pulled my car out of storage, driven it to Las Vegas without a
roof, and parked. Some “Ultimate Streetcars” are pulled out of full-size
race haulers, lifted up on air jacks, and fitted with electronic tire
warming blankets.
My
Goodyear Eagle F1 Assymetric tires were decent, not great, when new.
Now, six years later they look fine, and felt OK on the highway, so here
I am - the first car out onto the track for the morning’s run group.
Ambient temperatures are in the 40’s. I wouldn’t have been the least bit
surprised to see track temperatures lower than that.
I
make it three corners. At less than 45 mph, all the controls in the
Corvette go light, and I find myself doing a four-wheeled slide off the
track into the gravel. After punching myself in the face a few times, I
creep back onto the track and black flag myself for being a moron, but
don’t even get that far. Four corners later, it happens again, on the
slowest corner of the entire track. Off into the gravel I go.
My
wheels looking like rock tumblers and my mint Torch Red paint now
covered in a chalky fine layer of dust, I hang my head and limp back to
the paddock. I had gone off twice, during my warm up lap.
Now,
I’m not saying I’m the greatest driver in the world and would have won
the whole thing; far from it. I am saying that if I had bothered to
actually do the proper maintenance on my car, I would have been able to
set something resembling a lap time, instead of doing a piece of
terrible performance art.
More
importantly, what I had done was really fucking dangerous. Had the
track layout been different; had it been a cold morning in Daytona, or
Wisconsin, rather than Nevada, I may have hit a wall at 100 mph rather
than some gravel at 20.
Fast
forward a year. In November of 2013, Paul Walker and Roger Rodas were
hanging out at an open house and car show in front of the business they
owned together, Always Evolving. I had the pleasure of both their
company on several occasions; though we weren’t close, both Roger and
Paul were always a pleasure to be around, especially at the track, where
they spent a lot of time. Both were excellent drivers and upstanding
citizens. Neither of them would live to see the end of the day.
Roger,
an avid car collector with more than 50 cars to his name—including what
I believe is the largest collection of Saleen cars in the world—had
just bought himself a Porsche Carrera GT out of a long-term collection.
The
red-over-black Carrera GT was the right color combo and had a famous
owner in its history: Graham Rahal. It also had only 3,500 miles on the
odometer, making for a highly desirable example. He had just taken
delivery of the car that week. Paul, as big of a gearhead as he was, had
never been in a Carrera GT before. It was a Sunday, so the large office
park was all-but-deserted save for AE’s small section of parking lot.
“Just once around the block.”
Once
around the block was all it took to kill them both. The 3,500 mile
Carrera GT was shod with its original tires. They, like the car attached
to them, were 9 years old.
Roger lost control of the Carrera GT at an estimated 90 mph, and hit a tree.
The
mainstream media, and indeed many automotive-focused web sites, simply
couldn’t wait to report on the irony of the situation, that someone
known for playing a character who drives crazy is killed in a supercar
doing double the speed limit in an office park.
I
was distraught the first couple of days, but honestly, all I could
think about was how the crash happened, and I just kept going back to
that day at Spring Mountain. This was a super low-mileage car. Roger was
a really good driver. There were no other cars around or last-minute
obstacles to avoid. It had to have been on original tires.
No
one talked about the tires. Everyone wanted to hang Paul and Roger out
to dry as their speeding scapegoats. The tires were a footnote to an
exaggerated story, and it became a missed opportunity to teach a very
real lesson. The LA Times reported one article on it nearly 5
months after the crash, and that was it. The cause of the crash was
still ruled “unsafe speed for the conditions.” And not “tires, which may
as well have been made of paper mache.”
I’ve
been to that office park, and I know that corner, and you can take that
corner at 90 mph in a fucking Prius, as long as you have tires that
aren’t 9 years old. In a Carrera GT you could take it at 90, one-handed,
while sipping a Venti Latte. I’m not saying you should be legally
allowed to rip around an office park at 90, but from a technical sense,
the actual cause of the crash was trash old tires. “Unsafe
speed for the conditions” may have been the ticket Roger would have
gotten if a cop stopped him, but that’s not what caused the accident.
I
know no one wants to hear this, but I’m going to say it: Roger was a
great driver, and actually quite conservative. And if he had a new set
of tires on the car, that crash wouldn’t have happened, because 90 mph
on that corner is nothing for a Carrera GT. With old tires, it’s not
like you get oversteer or understeer, and you then correct, and back it
down. They seem fine one minute, you hit the brakes or turn the wheel,
and then they are just gone. You’re a passenger. Or, at least I was,
back at Spring Mountain in 2012.
The
Carrera GT was a handful when it was new, which gives it an edge as a
collector’s item; an edge you don’t get from a Bentley. Leno spun one
out, so did Seinfeld. It’s got a notoriously grabby clutch, a manic
engine, and no electronic drivers aids whatsoever. It’s known for being
nasty, sharing its legacy alongside the Ford GT as the last of the truly
analog cars, discontinued because the government said we need stability
control now.
Sort
of like the Porsche 550 Spyder, a beautiful and successful racing
machine far overshadowed by the young, handsome actor who happens to
have killed himself in one.
I
haven’t driven a Carrera GT in years, but I’m told that fitting a new
set of Pilot Super Sports or Cup2’s on them really improve the
drivability and dial back a bit of the sketchiness. The original tires,
even when they were new, weren’t great. At 9 years old, they are
absolutely worthless.
After
the dust settled, I got a phone call from a lawyer claiming to
represent Meadow Walker in a lawsuit against Porsche. He wanted me to
testify that I thought the Carrera GT was a dangerous car, an opinion
that he presented to me, and not the other way around.
I
do not think the Carrera GT is inherently dangerous; I just don’t think
it’s reasonable to expect a car to save passengers in a 90 mph
broadside crash, nor to expect that the lack of stability management,
rather than the old tires, caused the crash. And of course, the car
passed all the necessary steps when new, and had now been out of
production for nearly a decade. I say this with a straight face after
losing two friends in that crash.
As
badly as I feel for both Paul and Roger’s children, it is my opinion
that the wrongful death lawsuit against Porsche is a greedy lawyer cash
grab and has very little to do with the Walker or Rodas family, both of
whom have plenty of money to live off.
The
point, kids, is if you have a car you don’t drive very often; or if you
buy a car from a collection and it has low miles; or if you buy a car
that has been sitting for any period of time, or used sporadically:
check the tires, and change the tires. They may look like they are in
good shape with not many miles on them, but if they are out of date and
you don’t check, you won’t know anything’s gone wrong unless it’s too
late. Learn from my stupidity in this situation, or from poor Roger and
Paul. As they say, the life you save, may be your own.
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