Hybrid Racing stories

Alright, the discussion ends here. So far not one of the early "My Prius beat [insert car]" poster has said that they were running anything other than OEM tires. The following is predicated off this assumption. And before you guys start yelling that if I put such and such tires on then it would... I'll ask, how many on here actually have aftermarket tires on their Prius? Don't lie.


The definitive answer as to whether this car can out handle or out accelerate anything lies in it's tires.

The Prius comes equipped with a skinny, tall tire. Much skinnier and taller than anything you might find on even a pseudo performance car. 165/60/14 is what I would classify as distinctly non-performance oriented. To top it off these tires are of the LRR (Low Rolling Resistance) variety. In other words, they are designed for a minimal amount of friction on the road. This allows the car to obtain maximum efficiency. The trade off is poor lateral grip. Any one who is associated with racing (the legal kind) will tell you that tires have the largest impact on performance out of all suspension components.

Let's go into make believe land for a second so I can demonstrate my point. If we were to run a Prius equipped with a top flight race tuned suspension designed by Toyota themselves but still running the stock tire, against a stock '88 Mustang equipped with..let's say 245/40/R17 Yokohama AVS..something run of the mill...I seriously doubt the Prius could beat that Mustang in any handling category. Taking this one step further, any performance vehicle built in the more recent past would be equipped with tires and have the suspension to seriously outperform our make believe Prius.

While these tires seem to have good torsional tractive force for their size as evidenced by the braking performance, they still are only a 165/60/14 tire. This seriously limits the torque they can transmit to the ground regardless of how well the rubber compound and or tire design seems to perform in this respect. Of course, that means that acceleration is limited by the tires even if the car had some super duper high torque numbers at 0 RPM.

In conclusion, it's the tires stupid.

Ohh, the BBS I came from is called www.corner-carvers.com. Feel free to read what real race car builders and engineers have to say about the issue here. Here's a discussion about tire size. Many more where that came from.