Can You Lap Faster Than A Touring Car Champion Just By Changing Your Tyres?

Do you ever wonder how much more grip and speed you could get out of a set of track-biased tyres? Of course you do. We all do, especially those of us who do track days. Here’s some tasty food for thought with a video from Tyre Reviews.

Tyres are the key to better performance, being the only bits of the car to touch the asphalt… unless you do something very wrong on a corner. It’s no surprise that when more high-quality rubber is making contact with the road, the faster you can corner and the later you can brake. Track tyres have fewer sipes and grooves, with bigger tread blocks that flex less and give better purchase.

This is a straight test between current BTCC champion Gordon Shedden and our good buddy Jonathan Benson of Tyre Reviews. The circuit is the tiny loop at Knockhill, north of Edinburgh in Scotland. The task: to try to lap faster than Shedden, who has done ‘millions’ of laps of that track, just by changing the tyres.

In the road corner we have the Dunlop Sport Maxx RT2, and in the track corner it’s the Sport Maxx Race. On such a short circuit the differences are smaller than they’d be elsewhere, but it’s an intriguing comparison with some intriguing results…