AnotherGareth

The High Performance Course will be running a Young Drivers Day near Towcester on Saturday, 24th July 2024. This is open to those who are aged 30 years or less and hold a full driver's licence. The aims of the day are to: Promote awareness of driving skills at advanced levels Encourage the participants to develop their own skills Have fun More details at http://www.high-performance-course.com/ydd.htm

The High Performance Course will be running another Young Drivers' Day on the Saturday 27th July 2019. This is open to those who are aged 26 years or less and hold a full driver's licence, and who are not graduates of the High Performance Course. More details are available on the High Performance Course website - http://www.high-performance-course.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=14

The High Performance Course will be running another Young Drivers Day on the Saturday, 30th of July, 2016. This is open to those who are aged 26 years or less and hold a full driver's licence, and who are not graduates of the High Performance Course. The aims of the day are to: Promote awareness of driving skills at advanced levels Encourage the participants to develop their own skills Have fun More details are available on the High Performance Course website.

It's fun catching up on long running threads ... this comment almost made me laugh out loud. Fortunately I'm quite a sedate driver as some on here will attest. My wife and I have three cars, with different all season tyres on two of them, and for the third we have both winter and summer sets of wheels & tyres. While driving sedately, I find I go reasonably quickly in the cars with all season tyres. I've found the winter tyres we have don't feel all that reassuring when ambient is above a couple of degrees but I still seem to cover ground reasonably well. Being a sedate driver, my priorities are grip in poor weather conditions, rather than out and out speed. I reckon I can probably manage OK if the tyres are less optimal for more benign conditions.

To focus on one cause when arguing against putting tyres with better grip on the back is to rather miss the point; losing the rear can happen without braking.

I think you may have mislead yourself about what ABS does; it's a system that stops wheels locking up when braking. This isn't the case when the rear of the car starts to spin solely due to loss of grip. No braking involved. Another YouTube video has a nice presentation, even tho' the commentary is rather dry:

I'm certain they were optional, not standard.

On our L&K, with oem xenons, the outer is a projector fog, next is the dipped xenon projector, then innermost is the normal main beam. As far as I know, if oem xenons are not fitted, the outer is a projector fog, then there is a larger combined dipped/main. I understand it is a pita to fit the oem xenon lamps to cars that did not have xenons fitted in the factory; the wiring loom is different, and the system includes level sensors mounted on front and rear suspension. Not sure if there are other differences as well.

In case you are thinking about doing this, I've been told there are still a few places available.

See Regulation 27 (1) (a) which essentially means you aren't allowed to use certain incompatible types of tyre, (such as radial and cross-ply on the same axle, or radial on the front and cross-ply on the rear). If you are not going to use the vehicle above the UK national speed limit then you only need to fit tyres that are capable of at least the UK national speed limit. This is why the UK MOT test does not fail cars that have tyre speed ratings below the maximum speed of the car, but does fail cars that have tyres with speed ratings below 70 mph. In practice, though, because tyre load ratings are an absolute legal requirement, and because manufacturers make limited combinations of load and speed ratings for any specific size of tyre, you'll tend to only be able to go down a few speed ratings on any particular car. For example, 205/45R16 (for a Mk1 Fabia vRS) is only available in H or above, (and only a small number of H-rated models are available in this size).

Yes - the requirement for car tyres is that they are good for 70 mph.

The High Performance Course will be running another Young Drivers Day on the 1st of August 2015. This is open to those who are aged 26 years or less and hold a full driver's licence, and who are not graduates of the High Performance Course. The aims of the day are to: Promote awareness of driving skills at advanced levels Encourage the participants to develop their own skills Have fun More details are available on the High Performance Course website.

It definitely sounds like there is something wrong with the brakes; with the normal setup you should be able to lock the wheels at 70 mph. The two main reasons for wanting bigger brakes are to avoid fade through repeated application, or for looks.

I know it's bad form to reply to yourself but something was bothering me and I think I worked out what it is. Years ago it used to be that the majority of cars could have snow chains fitted but I think that's less the case these days, partly because of the fashion for having larger wheels and lower profile tyres, (and manufacturers play to this in order to increase sales), but also because a larger proportion of performance variants are sold in each model range. I would suggest that if the manufacturer says snow chains shouldn't be fitted to the oe wheels & tyres, that's a fairly good indication that the default fitment is optimised for warmer conditions.

Could this be the difference between petrol and diesel? Cars with diesel engines are notoriously slow to warm up from cold unless they have some additional system to provide warmth to the cabin while the engine is warming up - makes demisting in the mornings a right pita. Cars with petrol engines, on the other hand, generally warm up even when idling. Shockingly, I seen the temperature gauge on our (diesel) Octavia start to drop after being stuck in a queue for a long time ....