Wider is not better

Last year, I had stock brakes and (very good Semperit) 15inch 195 section-width snow tyres. This year I have big brakes and 17inch 225 section-width snow tyres.

Wider is not better. In fact, wider is damn near worthless.

I'm a total tyre freak, and I'm seriously questioning my decision to go with 17inch 225/45 snows. I got a lead on a bunch of good quality Dunlops for cheap (dirt cheap), and I figured why bother with a whole new set of 16s - I'd have to buy wheels along with tyres. If I grabbed the 17s, I could slap them on my tired-but-pretty Rials and wait until summer to get new wheels and so forth. I snagged them and mounted them up. In the cold and dry, they're everything snows should be - firm, solid, and great grip.

It just snowed in Detroit. The only redeeming factor is the stopping. I can stop with no trouble. But going? Going ain't happening as far as I can tell. It's kind of weird to have the going be the hard part. After all, it's the stopping that usually kills you. And who wants skinny tyres? I sure see the point.

Oh well, lesson learned. I've got three seasons to go on these unless a set of 16s somehow falls into my lap.

Mushroom trucks

We've all heard about how the Dodge Ram logo looks like a uterus. That is only meaningful if you know what a uterus is. If you're seven years old, you probably don't see the resemblance. That does not mean, however, that you think it looks like a sheep with horns.

On the way back from visiting the grandparents, I occupied my sons with identification of the assorted cars we passed and were passed by on the Ohio Turnpike. My younger one kept announcing "mushroom trucks". I had to ask him to point out what a "mushroom truck" was. I'm from eastern PA, and mushroom trucks over there are usually full of mushrooms. He pointed out a Grand Caravan and announced that it was a "mushroom minivan".

Hey, at least he didn't think it was a body part....

Buckle up. Yeah, you. With the harness.

There's this pesky rule over at NHTSA that motor vehicles have to have safety belts that are interlocked to a warning system that tells you if they're not securely fastened while the car is running. I recently discovered while riding around in my girlfriend's new New Beetle that this function is also tied into the passenger airbag sensor in newer cars. Adding to the legal fun is your local police precinct, which will gladly cut you loose from a few greenbacks if you're caught motoring without restraint.

So where does this leave the weekend racer who drives his or her barely street-legal asphalt-eater during the week? Likely in a bind. The factory three-point belts are long-gone due to their complete lack of utility at more than 0.02g and proper five-point harnesses have been installed in their places. Multi-point harnesses rarely meet standard DOT or NHTSA safety requirements because they cannot be interlocked properly (or easily) to the vehicle's warning systems. The center cam locks that actually secure the harnesses are free of the traditional hard mounting points that enable sensor wiring to be deployed.

Word got to VPB recently that Ford and Roush are working on a new way of getting safety gear to communicate with the standard on-board systems that allow the interlocks to function. The communications issue seems to have something to do with data streams from independent systems. While I don't have much more info than that, I'm guessing that they are up to something that afficionados of factory-built racers will flock to: factory multi-point harnesses with full NHTSA- and DOT-legal interlock functionality.