[rdowty]

I'm going to need winter or all-season tires and there aren't many choices on tirerack even if you don't mind not having run-flats.

I really wish GM would realize that people want to drive there cars more than six months a year and quit making me buy new tires every time I get a new car. This thing is going to get delivered with summer tires in November and my first drive will have to be to the tire shop.

[IOMike]

Originally Posted by snaphappy

I remember journalists HATED the SS on the track because of the staggered wheels. How could Chevy make this mistake again?

I mean I get that the 1LE is for the track. BUT every single journalist is going to put the SS on the track first thing and just ramble on about oversteer or understeer, whichever they can find. And when they find it, they'll just write the car off as a complete failure.

Simply put, the last car was not setup properly in 2010 for a staggered setup. No one complained about the ZL1, which was staggered, but had been tweaked to work with it. Many many many high performance cars are staggered and if it's done right, it's ideal for high powered rwd. Porsche, Corvette, Ferrari etc.

[Norm Peterson]

Staggered tire setups sell because they "look race-y" (which appeals to the average customer) and because they are inherently understeerish (which eases the mfr's mind). The average customer can't tell understeer from underwear (and probably wouldn't care if he could anyway). Win-win for Chevy, and the experienced driving enthusiast kind of gets thrown under the bus here.

While understeerish staggered tire setups can be crutched with less understeerish suspension tuning than the car would get with 'square' tire sizing, you're then building a car that works at cross-purposes with itself, that ultimately throws away some grip at both ends of the car in order to come up with acceptable understeer budget numbers.

When you put a smaller tire on the heavy end, it will ultimately 'saturate' at lower cornering g's, and this will define the upper limit of cornering, even though excess cornering grip still exists at the rear that you can't get at.

Which brings the discussion around to power levels. Yes, you can use power to 'drift' the tail back into a more neutral cornering attitude. But this is not a stable condition, and certainly a trickier accomplishment than most average drivers are capable of doing with any consistency. Here, the excess rear grip crutches unknown skill levels (as seen from the mfr's point of view - they have to assume no more than minimal skills in at least some of their potential ZL buyers). Any additional margin against people spinning their cars out is a good thing.

For a skilled driver, the approach used for the 5th gen 1LE and Z/28 is better - a little stagger only in wheel widths helps keep rear slip angles from exceeding front slip angles and adds only a mild understeer effect rather than throwing away gobs of front tire grip to ensure that the rear stays back there.


About the Porsche in your list (and any rear- or mid-engine car) - any rear-heavy car absolutely needs the rear tires to be bigger. It's still a slip angle thing, and even Porsche has to keep the rear slip angles below the fronts under as many situations as possible.


Norm

[DGthe3]

Originally Posted by rdowty

I'm going to need winter or all-season tires and there aren't many choices on tirerack even if you don't mind not having run-flats.

I really wish GM would realize that people want to drive there cars more than six months a year and quit making me buy new tires every time I get a new car. This thing is going to get delivered with summer tires in November and my first drive will have to be to the tire shop.

GM knows what everybody else should know: regardless of what the car comes with from the factory, if its going to be driven in a cold/snowy area you should use winter tires. That applies to performance cars, econoboxes, minivans, trucks, whatever. All seasons are only recommended for temperatures a few degrees above freezing & warmer. So they're fine for states that are generally warm, like California or Texas, but they are not intended to be used in climates where its the norm to be below freezing a couple months out of the year.