Anyone ever heard of racing wets on snow/ice?

[jubuttib]

Heya, new guy on the forums, though I have lurked here quite often over the years.

I thought I'd go on a real Hail Mary quest and would like to ask if anyone here has ever tried, read or heard about the following subject: How well, if at all, do racing wet weather tyres fare on snow/ice?

The thought came up when thinking about how in some special cases racing cars have been driven on snow or ice as a publicity kind of thing, for example F1 cars seem to do it every year in various locales. Usually they're running modified versions of their full wet tyres, like for example Pirelli produces their full wets with added studs for F1 use in the winter (labeled IceZero or SottoZero instead of Cinturato usually). Full wets usually share some characteristics with winter tyres, namely being made of a soft compound with hefty grooving and fairly sharply edged blocks, though they do of course lack any siping and the studs.

There is of course a reason why winter tyres are used for winter racing when it happens, and I've seen lower level open-wheelers as well as GT cars running on road winter tyres, but I keep wondering whether or not full wets, possibly hand siped, would be completely horrible on snow/ice.

We already know that normal summer tyres for road cars though can be absolutely catastrophically bad, gripping worse on snow than even studless winter tyres manage on sheet ice. Still, data and experience is always better than just guessing.

[DiogoBrand]

Well, I imagine that even for full wets, heat is still important. Couple the low temperatures with the car's power, two wheel drive, speeds not high enough to generate downforce and you have more than enough ingredients for a car that's impossible to control. I'll go as far as saying I wouldn't be surprised if the full wets aren't significantly better than the slicks for use on snow.

[jubuttib]

Thank you for the response. FWIW I wasn't talking about just F1 or even open-wheel type cars (yes, I'm aware what these forums are, but people here can be very knowledgeable about other things too), so downforce isn't necessarily a massive issue here. =)

I'd expect heat to be important on tarmac, but I'm not sure it's that significant on snow, no matter how much you're sliding your tyres will tend to stay pretty cold after all. You'll want the tyre compound to naturally be as soft as you can get, and the softer rain compound should help the tyres stay softer than slicks in the cold as well. And from experience fecking about in the Finnish winter, any grooves is significantly better on snow than no grooves (even summer tyres are enough to get about in snow, but worn ones that are near slicks may not be able to get a car moving on flat ground).

But you may well be right, it could well be the difference between say 0.1 G worth of grip on slicks and 0.2 G worth of grip on full wets, which basically means very little in terms of actual drivability. Still hoping though that the hail mary pays off and someone has at least heard of something like this. =)

EDIT: And as another FWIW, these days Nordic style studless winter tyres can perform as good as the best studded road tyres on snow (not on ice though), so studs aren't an obligatory requirement for snow performance. European and North American style studless tyres don't get quite up to those levels.