Yes the pavement was completely clean and dry. I gassed it hard after the apex of the corner and only the front tires broke traction and moved laterally about a foot. There was no intervention from nanny, no cut throttle, brakes applied. Back tire never moved off its prescribed line. I have slid the front end on wet pavement previously but had never had the front jump laterally like this on wet or dry pavement. And yes this was a one time incident, had not happened previously.
....
I gotta agree with Mike - I reckon there must've been something else going on here for
BOTH tires to 'break traction' at exactly the same time & suddenly move laterally about a foot,
AND do so without an Nanny reaction &/or intervention either! :shocked:
Yeah, there's a possibility that it could've been due to sand or some other reason causing a particularly 'less grippy' section of road surface that was wide enough & angled just right to catch both front wheels at the same time..... but then you run into the questions of '
how come BOTH front wheels reacted identically & at the same time?' & '
why didn't the rear react similarly as it passed over the same patch of road surface?' & '
why didn't the Nanny react at all, when she does so readily for all sorts of other less critical incidents?' :dontknow: .
I've done
a lot of skid pan & dry track testing/playing with various tires fitted to Spyders, and I've never encountered or been able to create exactly what you've described Al,
BUT, I have encountered something that
sounds very similar - so I wonder if your '
... break in traction & front moving laterally about a foot ... ' could've been due to a very short momentary lift of both front wheels due to a road surface irregularity??
THAT I
have encountered, and if it's short/quick enough, the front wheels don't shift very far laterally at all and the Nanny may not detect &/or react to it because the wheels continue spinning at a '
close enough' speed for that moment, & it's so quick there's not enough yaw to register either!? :dontknow: That said, the feeling you get from
that occuring during cornering is more of a '
sudden lurch of the whole Spyder off track & across to one side' rather than the '
Oh come ON, turn you *******, turn!' feeling that you generally get from understeer! :sour: . You don't necessarily even feel the '
lift & bump' from the front wheels leaving the ground & then touching down again that you do generally feel if this happens when you're riding straight - the '
lurch sideways' effect seems to mask the '
lift & bump' very well - and in my experience, it's often only detectable by reviewing the video! :shocked: . It really doesn't take much in the way of a road surface irregularity either - given the right conditions & tire pressures etc, it can be caused by something as small & otherwise undetectable as the very fine seam between two runs of the surface laying machinery; not any thing you can
SEE, but once you
know it happened & exactly
where it happened, you can (sometimes
) go back & find the surface irregularity if you have a long enough straight edge & an otherwise smooth surface - and sometimes not! .
Just a thought?! :thumbup:
. Or, if you really want much better Dry weather performance & don't care so much about achieving the ultimate in tire life, there's tires that'll do that out there too - Toyo's & Yokohama's come to mind - they're still pretty good in the wet, but they're really designed to excel in the dry, and can do so with only a marginal loss in tire life if you get your pressures right!! :thumbup:
