Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Magic Roundabout

I have only just picked up on this thread as I have been pretty busy in these last few days.

Sorry to read about your mishap Phil. I have had some spins or near spins under various circumstances but I have never really encountered black ice. I did have a nasty sideways moment on a patch of icy road at an intersection that nearly put the Mog into a guard rail but fortunately was able to steer out of it.

Really I just wanted to mention something about so called all season tyres as I have done a little research on them. In our zone winter certified tyres, 3 mountain peaks and snowflake, are required or chains must be carried from 15 November to 15 April.



Generally all season tyres are a compromise that does not give the best performance under all conditions. Most commonly they give good performance in cold and wet conditions but are inadequate in snow. Furthermore they often have much longer braking distances on dry roads. Not exactly what you want with a Morgan. Running winter tyres all year round is not a good idea as true winter tyres have a much longer braking distance in the dry.

At the moment I have fitted Michelin CrossClimate tyres to the Plus 4 and Alis has had the same tyres fitted to her new VW Polo. According to Michelin these are a new type of tyre both in rubber compound and tread pattern. They say that they are summer tyres certified for snow. They have the required 3 mountain peaks snowflake branded on them.

I have driven the Morgan in falling snow but it was not settling on the road however my conclusion is that they grip exceptionally well on a wet road. In braking on a dry road they require a fractionally longer distance but for me I can't tell any difference. The only thing that I have noticed is that they have a slight tendency to break traction on hard acceleration from standstill, for example entering a main road from a side street, this may have something to do with the uni-directional nature of the tread pattern. All in all I am pretty happy with them. By the way I am running 1.6 bar at the front and 1.8 bar at the rear.

I believe other companies are now introducing similar tyres but the only others I found were from Nokian but I did not choose those because Nokian have been found to be supplying "special" tyres for testing and those tyres are better than their standard production tyres. I have heard that a Japanese company has introduced a similar tyre but I was unable to find it.

To sum up: if you are looking for a cross season tyre to use all year round make sure that its dry road braking performance is at least at the level of a good summer tyre and that it has the 3 mountain peaks and snowflake winter certification. On the CrossClimate it is small but it is there.



One last thing: as you can see from the photo above they are uni-directional. If I had realised this before fitting them I would probably have chosen a good by direction tyre of the same size to use as the spare.