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FK8 SportContact 6 Tread Wear

Wattpilot said:
Hi from NZ. My FK2 has now done 9600km (6000m) in 5 months and the Conti 6s are still showing great wear. Car is a daily driver. Maybe coming down to road surface/... Plenty of spirited driving but no track use. However ........ I will be thinking twice about tyres with new Conti 6s at NZ$650 each so interested in the opinions being shared.
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EACH???? Are they lined with gold leaf or unobtanium???
 
NZ prices are because the next closest country is 2000Mi away, and the audience is 4.5M people. Half London's population in the same area as the UK, about as far from Europe as you can get.
 
Our manager just spent a month over there and said it's quite surreal, roads are always clear and you can drive for miles until you see another car, he said even the busiest towns have minimal traffic
 
I had no idea how much 650 New Zealand Dollars was......but yeah £332 per tyre would certainly make your eyes water! :eek:
 
Wattpilot said:
Absolutely - median income in NZ is NZ$48000 (25000 pounds) - so tyres would be a fair whack. But we have a great landscape to go driving in.
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Shame they've gone in Australia's direction when it comes to speed limit breaches though.
 
Flaky_Bandit said:
Exactly so you don’t get a tail happy car. Tyre fitters hate me when I ask them to be swapped
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Looks like I may have to change how I've been doing it then.

Usually start with four brand new tyres, after a while swap front to the rear so I've got more tread at the front, then once those wear down replace all four.

Could help the wallet taking less of a hit in one go though only doing a pair at a time and putting the new tyres on at the rear every time, switching those then to the front.
 
Nidge76 said:
I think that on a fwd car if the rear tyres have less tread and therefore less grip the car is more likely to oversteer which is harder to control than understeer. Someone else can maybe confirm this or explain it better.
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Less tread doesn’t mean less grip. Race cars have slicks....
Tyres these days produce the same amount of grip across its whole life. It’s only when the tyre wears below 3mm generally it loses its ability to cut through standing water. Only giving you less grip in wet conditions.
It’s a valid point that you need rear grip on a fwd as for the average driver counteracting oversteer in a fwd it isn’t easy.
On the other hand the front tyres do the most work. All the steering, majority of the braking and power all goes through the front tyres. As for wet weather the front tyres clear majority of the standing water before the rear tyres follow track.
Another point to mention is modern day stability control is amazing. Even the technology on a 10 year old vehicle with ESP will blow your mind. 9/10 times the system would of saved your ass before you’ve reacted to it.
Car manufactures don’t recommend where new tyres should be positioned on a vehicle. But they recommend that they need to be even within a few mm of tread on each axle. VW recommend tyres on each axle to have no more than 3mm difference of tread. Also a difference of just 0.5mm can start to cause issues with the TPMS.
New tyres on the front or rear is debatable. But on modern vehicles I wouldn’t say it’s necessary. It’s an old recommendation that’s not really relevant anymore for today’s vehicles.


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i had a good look at my sport contact 6's when i swapped to michelin ps4s. i think the wear problem on the contis is due to them going hard (early) , they seem to lose their softness very quickly. i tried filing a section off the tyre and it literally shed rubber beads / balls / shavings at an alarming rate. i went and tried the same thing with some old michelin supersports i had in the garden and although way older (2 plus years) they hardly shed any rubber with the same amount of filing. will be interesting to see how the ps4's last.
 
If anybody is interested the SP6 tyres are not directional.
I asked the question earlier but confirmed it for myself this afternoon.
I have just finished swapping my wheels front to rear.....I used my trolley jack and got a loan of my dad's scissor jack for the rear. Took just under an hour.
I noticed the inside of the front tyres were wearing slightly more when I had the wheels off, but nothing to be particularly concerned about.
That should be me for a year if my current very low mileage stays the same.....then get rid of all 4 of these pesky SP6's :)
I estimate fronts will be on 2.5mm with rears on 3.5mm at around 6500 miles.
 
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I thought I was ok tread wise but went into a round about I know very well at speeds I have done before in this evenings dry weather and lost it, understeer into snap oversteer all sorts! Me trousers needed changing. Will have a good butchers tomorrow
 
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FaNtheMaN said:
I thought I was ok tread wise but went into a round about I know very well at speeds I have done before in this evenings dry weather and lost it, understeer into snap oversteer all sorts! Me trousers needed changing. Will have a good butchers tomorrow
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That's why you want grip at the front, the rear end drifting is far easier to control.
 
VTECMattC said:
That's why you want grip at the front, the rear end drifting is far easier to control.
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Oversteer is harder to control because you need to apply opposite lock....something which is completely alien to the average driver. Front wheel drive understeer is much more controllable because all you need to do is lift off the power and the vehicle will come back into line.
If there is a choice of more tread at the front or the rear, on a front wheel drive car you ideally want it at the rear.
 
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Ron240 said:
Oversteer is harder to control because you need to apply opposite lock....something which is completely alien to the average driver. Front wheel drive understeer is much more controllable because all you need to do is lift off the power and the vehicle will come back into line.
If there is a choice of more tread at the front or the rear, on a front wheel drive car you ideally want it at the rear.
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There are different opinions on this, but either way, the tread is there to disperse water. This roundabout incident happened in the dry - maybe tyre pressures or spilt diesel more likely.

Just my best guess :)
 
Mark_FK8 said:
There are different opinions on this, but either way, the tread is there to disperse water. This roundabout incident happened in the dry - maybe tyre pressures or spilt diesel more likely.

Just my best guess :)
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You make an excellent point, race cars have slicks after all....maybe it was temps, hadn't been out that long

I agree Ron, understeer all day long for me!!!
 
Ron240 said:
Oversteer is harder to control because you need to apply opposite lock....something which is completely alien to the average driver. Front wheel drive understeer is much more controllable because all you need to do is lift off the power and the vehicle will come back into line.
If there is a choice of more tread at the front or the rear, on a front wheel drive car you ideally want it at the rear.
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Horses for courses, but lift off mid corner it will go understeer to lift off oversteer, ill stick with more front end grip. The TC keeps it mostly in check regardless.
 
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