snow and quattros

[Tom Nas <tnas@euronet.nl>]

Hi all,

The first snow here fell on Friday. We don't get a lot of snow here, so
it's not even an inch thick- still more than enough to make things
slippery. They've been putting salt on the roads as soon as it started
snowing, but it's snowed over the salt and has made some roads even more
slippery. I needed to use my car last night (so far I'd been covering
everything by bike or on foot) and had my first experience with AWD in the
snow. Note to self: Pirelli P5000 Dragos, while excellent rain tyres, suck
in snow. I had an interesting experience while negotiating a turn- first
the grip on the front wheels went, giving me an interesting RWD behaviour.
Then the front tyres regained grip and the rears lost it, which made the
car feel extremely weird.

Most of the snow has turned to pure ice now, so I guess even snow tyres
wouldn't help. Better get me some studded tyres for the ATB... ;-)

I followed a new Golf home last night, first noticed it had Xenon
headlights (Huh? a Golf with Xe lights?) and German WOB (-Wolfsburg)
plates. I noticed a 4Motion badge on the rear end and rather narrow tyres
on plain steel wheels without covers. Hmmm... it certainly was quick
through turns where I would slow down to a crawl for fear of losing it.

Guess I need different tyres to really have fun on the white stuff...

Tom

 _______________________________________________________________________
 Tom Nas                                          Zeist, The Netherlands
 tnas@euronet.nl
 1987 Audi 90q 2.3E, Tizianrot metallic, 167,000km

                        ENGINEERING TERMINOLOGY
       PHRASE: "Preliminary operational tests were inconclusive."
     TRANSLATION: "The darn thing blew up when we threw the switch."