Well that's not completely accurate. It was quite a drive picking the car up in Atlanta but the roads from Atlanta to NYC are so smooth. It's mostly hi-way cruising.

This trip was NYC->Mystic Seaport->Montebello, QE->Mont Temblant, QE->Quebec City, QE->Sherborne VT->NYC.

These roads were very different from the Atlanta trip.

First of all nothing broke! Yeah!

The Quebec hi-way police are most unpleasant. A fine with a French accent is still a fine ... There's absolutely NO ROMANCE in this! Yes, I got a ticket, in a construction zone. They LOVE to hang out in those and my radar detector (illegal in Canada) was not up yet. So natch I got nailed , but UNFAIRLY! The officer/mountie or whatever was not open to discussions of any sort.

Second, a lot of the roads in Quebec suck. The low profile tires and firmer suspension are not your friend in this situation. I guess it's the extreme weather. But this is what leads to my question.

I read Brutal's contributions to that very long thread on alignments and printed out the pertinent stuff though many of the documents attached in that thread will not open?

I gave all this stuff to my highly skilled alignment guy (he works on the Pirelli team for the Rolex race series here in the USA) and he said he already knew about the issues with these cars. So he did an alignment on my car and said it was only slightly off. There were no driving issues before the alignment.

So what I noticed on the crowned and crummy (lots of small bumps & ruts) roads in Quebec is that the car wanted to dart right/left quite a bit and once in the heavy rain the whole car moved about a foot sideways and scared both of us. I couldn't see the road very well at the time so I don't know what caused that.

So is this perhaps just normal behavior on crowned roads that also have bumps and ruts?

Perhaps these wide tires just do tram-line quite easily in such conditions?

I had zero issues on the smoother roads during the trip. Even the twisty nicer country roads seemed OK.

Or ... has my alignment guy not set enough toe-in thinking he's going to save my tires?

Castor is perfect and there's no more adjustment available.

Bob S.

 

As I understand it, lacking toe-in will do the opposite of saving the tires! (Lacking toe causes the tire wear.)

What tire pressures do you run?

I'm working on the basis that you have the right load rating etc tires, of course.

 

Sounds like tramlining to me. If it doesn't happen on your local roads that are in better condition then I'd chalk it up to heavily rutted roads up North. Not much you can do about that with the wide tire contact area. The other event sounds like hydroplaning, perhaps in combination with tramlining.

I had a heavily modified Saab 9000 Aero pushing over 300hp through the front wheels and had some nasty torque steer, add that to a rutted road and I'd be lucky if I wasn't in the ditch everytime I hit the gas. But on a decent road it was quite managable.

You glossed over the details of the traffic stop....

 

I was just waiting for someone to ask ...

So it's a reduced width zone and I have a pair of those double trailer rigs in the RH lane and I really didn't want to stay along side of them so I goosed it a bit to get ahead of them andf yes I exceeded the 80km (clocked & f*cked @ 110) limit to pass them. There's no other way to get by is there ... So as I cleared the lead truck there he was standing by the side of the road gun in hand. Nailed!

Had I had my detector on I might have picked up an early warning, who knows.

Bob S.

 

Ah, that is a bummer. I completely understand not wanting to be rolling beside a double trailer rig on a narrow highway. And it's so easy to grab a handful of speed with an STR. They probably know this is a good spot to make some money!

 

Bingo! I noticed 2 more of these setups after that. So apparently they like doing this in Quebec.

Bob S. (first speeding ticket in over 15 years)