TripleS wrote:My greatest worry has always been severe understeer at a LH bend, leading to a head-on shunt with an oncomer, so if having the best tyres on the front leaves me open to a bit more risk of oversteer, I've always been minded to accept that.
Your style of driving, (unless it has drastically changed recently), is such that you're not ever likely to face the situation of dramatic loss of front end grip going into a corner. Your cornering speeds are quite low as you prefer to make progress between corners.
I think you are under-estimating the potential severity of that oversteer; my understanding is that when the rear tyres lose grip a sudden spin is the result, and this happens so rapidly it's beyond the ability of most motorists to catch. Certainly well beyond my capabilities.
My only (relatively) recent experience of this was when I went on a limit handling course. In that case, I suffered two instances of spinning at about 50 mph on dry concrete. A horrible, if safe, experience, and the cause was braking too much at the wrong time while on a bend.
Under the guidance of the coach, I was trying to improve my time around a short test track and each time had got to the point where I was going too fast around a tight bend leading to loss of confidence. I braked, enough to increase the grip on the front tyres but unfortunately decreasing the grip at the back. The resulting spins were unbelievably quick.
The coach then gave me an outline about how grip changes with the balance of the car, and how the changes in grip are non-linear. When braking,
as grip increases in ever smaller amounts at the front, it decreases in ever larger amounts at the rear. This is why people talk about braking in a straight line, and although it is possible to brake on a bend, without some rather specific training to sensitize one to what happening, it is hard to detect when the back is getting close to the point where it will break away.
Getting back to the point about having the grippiest tyres at the back; I absolutely want more grip at the back so that there is less chance of that sort of thing happening on the road.
there is only the road, nothing but the road ...