It’s amazing how differently your car can handle in wet versus dry conditions. The tread in your tyre suddenly has to work in order to provide a rubber to road connection that it didn’t have to do previously. And yet do you even consider this when the rain starts to pour down?
I can certainly tell the difference between conditions in my car. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the rubber I have fitted at the moment is only average when it comes to traction in wet conditions as compared to dry. In the wet, I can get the wheels spinning; a very rare occurrence in the dry.
As per the highway code, stopping distances are double (or more) in wet weather conditions – this applies even if it’s no longer raining as the surface could well still be water slick. My recommendation is to drive with even more care and vigilance than you would normally when tackling wet weather RoSPA recommends that you have 3mm tread depth as a minimum. That’s worth considering and is more than the legal minimum of 1.6mm over the circumference of the tyre.
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