Continental's Advanced Mould Concept being tested on an Audi TT at the Barcelona racetrack

However good a car’s chassis is, the only contact it ever has with the road is through four tyre patches about the size of postcards. And nothing is more crucial to your safety or your car’s behaviour than the quality of those patches.

In a high-performance car, each driven wheel may be asked to transmit 200bhp during acceleration, but the stresses imposed by the brakes can make such forces look puny. Torque of up to a staggering 804kgm can be rammed through the tyres under heavy braking.

All of which means that tyre design needs to be a pretty sophisticated business these days. Take Continental’s new ContiSport-Contact 2 which concentrates on two areas: ‘macrocontact’ and ‘microcontact’. Macrocontact is concerned with the way the contact patch behaves under braking, cornering and acceleration, and that has as much to do with the design of the overall carcass as with the tread. Bob Powell, Continental’s technical services manager, explains the approach: “We liken the contact patch to a cat’s paw. When a big cat is running, its paws stay quite narrow, but when it puts the brakes on the paws spread out to provide m ore grip.”

Continental has adopted what it calls the Advanced Mould Concept (AMC) to achieve a similar effect. “Driving normally, the tread remains quite narrow, producing low rolling resistance, but under braking all tyres get wider to some extent. With AMC, the angles of radii in the shoulder increase the effect and make the tyre disproportionately wider under braking.”

E

High-tech ContiSport-Contact 2 tyre looks surprsingly normal

ven more intriguing is the thinking behind microcontact. “There’s a conflict of interest between a tread compound designed for maximum grip and one designed for good steering response,” says Powell. “For good grip, the compound needs to key-in to the road surface. But if the compounds are too flexible then handling and steering response will suffer.”

Continental’s answer consists of two chemical networks within the tyre compound, which it calls BiNet (Bionic Net). One network remains stiff enough to deliver accurate handling and steering, but when the tyre loads up the second network becomes more flexible, increasing both heat and grip.

The results are impressive, offering wet braking performance claimed to be 11 percent better than its predecessor. Aquaplaning resistance is improved by eight percent, while handling and braking in the dry are improved by more than four percent. But for such an advanced design, the tread pattern looks surprisingly ordinary. Powell doesn’t disagree, but his reply is simple: “Fashion is a matter of taste. We aimed to deliver a tyre that proves itself through performance, which is what this one does.”