Well, what a race? The cool summer’s day in Germany gave us a fantastic Grand Prix at the infamous Nurburgring yesterday. British driver Lewis Hamilton went a long way to showing his recent critics precisely why he has every right to continue driving with aggressive passion that was just too much for his competitors.

Hamilton squeezed every ounce of power and pace out of his McLaren and he fought admirably to take and re-take leadership of the race several times. A fantastic qualifying lap shoved Vettel off the front row for the first time in months and Lewis took his chance to beat Webber’s sluggish start into the first corner. The racing to follow from Hamilton, Webber and Alonso was edge of the seat stuff and Hamilton came out well ahead of the other podium finishers thanks to some superb overtaking at critical moments in the race.

Sebastian Vettel had a terrible weekend, but somehow he still claimed valuable points with a fourth place finish thanks to a pedestrian tyre stop on the final lap by Philipe Massa in the scarlet Ferrari. Lucky for the German driver who was slow and even spun midway through the race to lose valuable time on the impressive front three.

It seems that RedBull’s early season dominance is coming to an end. McLaren and Ferrari are fighting back, no doubt about it, but is it all a little too late with only 9 races left in the F1 season? I for one, can’t wait to see what transpires over the next handful of races..

Well done Lewis and what a shame that Jenson Button didn’t get a chance to complete what could have been another thrilling finish.

James

I was sat in the office today trying to find some great tyre quotes for a customer who was asking for some good tyres. When I asked what was important to them or if they had any preference in brand or model, the response was vague and they didn’t know what brand was on their car at the time.

So where do we start to help this customer – what does make a ‘good’ tyre?

GRIP

A fair place to start. We want our tyres to grip. We don’t want to be going round a corner or roundabout, turning the steering wheel only to watch in horror as the car slides off the road. When we accelerate or brake, the car should speed up and slow down, not just spin and skid about like a puppy on a frozen pond. Grip is important in all conditions too. We want our tyres to grip in the cold and the wet as much as we do in the warm and dry.

The rainy UK provides quite a challenge, especially with the frequency of ‘flash flooding’ these days. Great lakes of water suddenly appearing on hard dry ground with nowhere for it to drain – our tyres need to be designed to cut through this surface water to find grip on the surface below instead of ski or ‘aqua-plane’ across the top of the water.

WEAR

Although we want lots of grip from our tyres, we don’t want this at the cost of poor tyre wear. If a tyre is made of soft, sticky rubber it might provide lots of grip on tarmac but equally the soft rubber will wear down very quickly and we’ll be needing to replace them all too soon.

This is why we see the different tyres in Formula One. Soft tyres for super fast laps but not too many of them on tracks that cut into the soft tyres and wear them down. Hard tyres for lots of laps without pitstops but not quite as grippy for super fast cornering..

At TyreQuote.com we definitely notice that customers using cheaper tyres are coming back more quickly to replace them than those buying more expensive branded tyres that last a bit longer, with lower levels of tyre wear.

NOISE

Whilst some drivers and motorists seem to favour lots of noise judging by their mammoth fuel guzzling engines and monsterous exhaust pipes, there are others that like to enjoy a quieter ride. With electric and hybrid cars becoming more common and manufacturers working hard to keep the sound from their engines under the bonnet we are more and more finding general motoring a nice and quiet ride. If you have comfy air suspension to waft you over the bumps and lumps in the road then you can enjoy whispered conversation with your passengers even at 60mph.

However, believe it or not, this can be ruined by poorly designed or even just badly fitted tyres.

We’ve already decided we want tyres that grip and tyres that dont wear too quickly but if the pattern on the tyre is so harsh so as to give us grip, it could become incredibly noisy when it rolls and rattles along the rode. if the rubber is very hard and we have a very ‘low profile’ (not much rubber between our wheel and the road) tyre then equally we could be having a noisy journey again.

Compromise

So ideally we want a relatively smooth pattern on the tyre to keep it as round as possible and the lack of noise will also mean better aero dynamics, less drag and increased fuel efficiency. Perfect. Well almost – except as we reduce the pattern and hardness of the rubber, we lose our grip and tyre wear! D’oh!

So it’s not easy to find the perfect tyre. Like many things in life, it’s all about compromise. More grip, more tyre wear. Less grip, less tyre wear. More grip, more noise.. and it goes on.

It really comes down to what sort of driving do you so. If you have a 4×4 and actually go off road more than up on to the school curb then you will want more grip and probably wont mind the extra noise as you are merrily chewing up hills. If you potter around town at 30mph most of the time, then who needs lots of grip? Just find something hard wearing and with low noise and fuel efficient.

Do you live in the Scottish highlands or Yorkshire moors and have early starts up your steep cobbled drive? Okay, a little specific here but seriously think about winter tyres for the winter – you will get even more grip, especially on the snow and ice. You might be better off with a 4 wheel drive car than a rear wheel drive car too then you can benefit from the grip of all 4 tyres, not just the 2 spinning away at the back!

When you are looking for great quotes for tyres on TyreQuote.com make sure you look at our reviews of the tyres you think you want. Do they have the right levels of grip, tyre wear, noise and fuel efficiency for your driving?

Thanks for reading,

James

At TyreQuote.com we can’t help but get a little bit excited about watching a Grand Prix or two. We like tyres and we like racing – shame then that this weekend’s European Grand Prix didn’t exactly hit the high notes of the previous round in Montreal when Britain’s Jenson Button finally exploited a chink in the otherwise unflappable armour of Seb Vettel.

With the Canadian rain a distant memory on the sun baked Valencia street track, there was simply a sad lack of action at the business end of things. A tidy overtaking from Alonso on Webber was really the only glimmer of the elite talent that we hope to witness each time we tune into the excellent BBC coverage. Perhaps it’s just sour grapes that the McLarens of Hamilton and Button simply didn’t have the pace to challenge and with only a couple of short week’s until the British GrandPrix, it will have to be rain dances around Silverstone to mitigate against another domination from Red Bull and the infuriating finger wagging Vettel.

So while we pray for some more technological genius to pour out of the McLaren headquarters in Surrey to prompt a championship challenge at last we can briefly reflect on our other passion – tyres. This weekend’s Valencia Grand Prix saw the introduction of Pirelli’s medium compound PZero tyre in an effort to withstand the harsh and hot track surface.  During the build up to the race it seemed that as usual the different teams had different opinions on the Pirelli tyres and McLaren themselves seemed to be complaining that the medium compound wasn’t really giving them enough grip compared to the softer option tyres and getting enough heat into the medium and hard tyres over the course of the season so far was proving tricky. Ferrari have also been reported to voice disappointment in the Pirelli tyres with Fernando Alonso getting most upset at the recent Spanish Grand Prix when he was even lapped by the front runners because he couldn’t get any grip or pace from the harder tyres offered by Pirelli. Many of the drivers stopped 4 times that race, so the evidence was that the tyre strategy wasn’t quite right.

At TyreQuote.com we think Pirelli have done a good job returning to Formula 1 so far this season and hopefully we can see a return to more spectacular racing soon. Good to luck to Lewis and Jenson at Silverstone!

If you are looking to purchase Pirelli tyres for your own car, try our brilliant and innovative Tyre Quote service, finding you the best prices from all your local tyre fitters.