Just was thinking this while my car was getting serviced.. Why do regular vehicles have tread which gets less responsive as it loses it’s tread, while race cars use slick tires for maximum grip? Wouldn’t physics say more tire on road = more surface to grip? If so, why do our cars even have tread? Is it simply to save on MPG? If so, are tires with worn thread less responsive?
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Slick tires *do* give more grip for the reason you mentioned. The big caveat to that is that’s only true on roads that are completely dry.
If your cars tires didn’t have tread blocks on them, you’d immediately die when it rained because your tires would have no way to channel water and you’d just hydroplane and crash. The entire purpose of having ‘channels’ on your tires is so that when you’re driving on wet roads, the water can escape through the channels instead of you just hydroplaning on top of it.
On passenger cars, it’s far more important to have tires that work in numerous different conditions than to extract the most performance possible on dry roads.
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