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 ....

Many years ago we had F1 GS-D2 and they were brilliant in the wet. After they stopped being available in our size, and the replacement model also wasn't available our size, I thought about what I most wanted from a tyre and, deciding that I wanted good wet weather grip throughout the life of the tyre, selected Goodyear Hydragrip. When Hydragrip was no longer available in our size, I moved on to Goodyear Optigrip as that seemed to be the replacement mode. When Optigrip started getting in short supply, I asked Goodyear technical support what model replaced it, and they said Efficient Grip Performance. I hope it's as good in the wet as the earlier tyres ...

Apparently, from a safety point of view, if you are the kind of driver who generally doesn't want to drive especially quickly, doesn't try to maximise cornering speed, and always leaves a decent distance to the vehicle ahead, and doesn't want to bother with the downsides of having two sets of wheels and/or tyres, then having tyres that are optimised for the worst weather conditions is best. We've somewhat sleep-walked into the situation where the default tyres fitted to cars are optimised for summer weather, probably because in general we're more bothered by fashion than performance. Many (but not all) summer tyres are designed to have a long life and/or designed to have a lower than average rolling resistance, in both cases making them more economical than alternatives. Some people choose specific summer tyres for performance reasons but that's probably a small minority. Many just buy the cheapest on the day they arrive at the tyre fitters. Just as they risk crashes if they choose summer tyres that aren't as good as the best in that category. Agreed, providing that one set covers all conditions that one is likely to meet. For us, on two of our cars, we've decided that fitting all-season tyres will mean we can get around with greater safety in cold winter conditions as well as when the weather is more benign. That's not to say that using summer tyres on roads covered with a hard frost or when it is cold and wet isn't a heck of a lot of fun, because it is, but when we have a reason for actually wanting to get somewhere rather than just playing, more appropriate tyres serve us better. The particular reason we chose to use all-season instead of summer tyres throughout year is that we found that, in some wintery conditions it was practically impossible to complete some journeys. Regarding braking distances; I don't know how, for example, 205/55VR16 summer tyres from Continental, Falken, Goodyear, Kumho or Vredestein compare at 12C on dry roads in a straight line at 70 mph on my car. I read reviews and try to get a feel for the strengths of each tyre and weigh them up against the cost, but I don't actually know. I don't know how they would compare if it was raining, or if there was standing water, or if the ambient was higher or lower, or how they would compare if following a curve instead of a straight line. I know from comparative tyre tests that some tyres seem to do one thing really well, sometimes at the expense of other characteristics, and in general the range of behaviours of premium tyres will be better than that of mid-range tyres and those, in turn, will be better than that of budget tyres. So I ask, if a particular all-season or winter tyre has a longer braking distance in the summer than a premium summer tyre but a shorter braking distance than, say, a mid-range or budget summer tyre, does that make choosing an all-season or winter tyre to use throughout the year a poor choice? If it does, what does that say about people who choose mid-range or budget tyres?

Why? What difference does it make? People generally drive to the grip levels they feel, (to do anything else would be foolish after all). You don't seem to be asking how much worse one summer tyre will be compared to another at, say, 15C, in the the dry, in the rain, in standing water, so what is bothering you about non-summer tyres? What is too long? I've seen suggestions that it's time to take winters off when it's warm enough to have a beer outside after swapping the wheels! How do you choose tyres? For me it's mostly guess-work but I try to think about the worst conditions I'm likely to meet. At this time of year, I'm finding enough days when the ground is frosty and fairly slippery very early in the morning, so I'd like a tyre that can easily cope with that. I can adjust the way I drive when conditions are more benign. Some people do keep winter tyres on all year around. I was talking to the owner of a 911 yesterday who said he has a second set of alloys with winter tyres for his car, but his wife's car has winter tyres all the time because she doesn't notice any difference during the summer, but certainly benefits when conditions are bad. She doesn't press hard on the tyres, and I'm sure that's the case for most drivers.

I thought the idea of the thermostat was to stop coolant circulating through the radiator until the engine has warmed up sufficiently. I'm not sure how much a grill cover reduces air flow (cooling) to the outside of the engine, and whether this is likely to make a significant difference unless the thermostat is always partially open, or opening earlier than it should. The engine should warm up quicker if you don't try to heat up the cabin ... I remember doing the reverse in bygone days in cars that had marginal cooling - turning up the interior heating to maximum to prevent the engine overheating while queueing on hot summer days.

Definitely not enough time to bring the coolant up to normal operating temperature, let alone the engine and gearbox oils. I expect fuel consumption isn't all that good either. However it's worth taking a longer drive sometime to see if the thermostat is operating correctly; if it is staying open when it should be closed the gauge can take an awful long time to get to 'normal' and, while it is meant to be warming up, you might sometimes see the needle dip a little!

A comparable 'family' car from 30+ years ago might be the MkV Cortina with, for example, 185/70R13 tyres fitted to the premium models whereas 195/65 on an Octavia puts it more at the shopping trolley end.

Did you have the stability control partially or fully disabled? I find it's very intrusive when on but it's a good idea to keep it enabled if you have limited experience of powerful rwd cars. Have you considered investing in some extra road driving tuition, the kind that is geared up to driving powerful cars? Examples include the High Performance Course and Ride Drive. I've been thinking that an e39 540i should be good as well, although trickier to find manual examples.

Are the Koni FSDs knackered or are you just unhappy with them?

FWIW the legal requirement varies across Europe. For example, in Sweden winter tyres can no longer be used in the winter months when the tread gets down to 3 mm. Last April my front Vredestein Snowtrac 3 tyres were almost all the way down to the 1.6 mm tread wear indicator and the sipes were still showing. In November I replaced couple of Hankook Optimo 4S tyres at about 2mm and the sipes had started to disappear. I reckon that while winter (or all-season) tyres will have lost much of their effectiveness for use in cold and wet wintery conditions by the time they get down to 4 mm, they're probably still more effective than equivalent summer tyres all the way down to 1.6 mm.

The easiest answer would have been to ask you to look on the inside of the fuel filler flap, then add 0.2 bar as per the generic Skoda recommendation.