Every new tyre arrives with a label showing three things: a fuel figure, a noise figure and a letter from A to E for wet grip. The first two are worth knowing. The third decides whether you stop short of the car in front or arrive into it, and it is the one almost nobody reads.
That letter earns its keep in the hours when we do a great deal of our work. Headlights are poor at showing water lying on tarmac, so you tend to see the film you are already driving through rather than the one ahead. A lower graded tyre feels perfectly fine on a dry afternoon. It makes its argument once, in the dark, on a wet surface, as you brake for something you picked up late.
So when we turn out at two in the morning we tell you which grade is going on the car and how it compares with the tyre on the other side of that axle. Fitting something lower without mentioning it would be an easy thing to do at that hour.
The airport run is the classic one. Five in the morning, bags in the boot, and a tyre that has gone down overnight on a driveway in Hounslow West. There is a flight to catch and nowhere open, and the compressor in the boot is not going to hold it for the whole journey. A Lampton cul-de-sac or a Cranford main road, tell us which. A tight terrace in Cranford or a narrow bay on Bath Road is usually workable.
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Much of the driving around Lampton, Hounslow West and the streets off the High Street happens after dark, on roads lit well enough to show a kerb and not well enough to show standing water. We answer the phone at any hour of the day or night, and we would sooner explain what is going onto the car than fit it in silence.
A driver on a side street near Lampton wanted to know why we carried two different tyres in the same size and what separated them. We showed them the grading on both and fitted the higher one, matching the tyre already on that axle.
A puncture job on the A315 at night turned up a car whose front tyres had been bought a year apart and graded differently. Under braking in the wet that pulls, because one end bites before the other. The owner was glad to be told.
Someone leaving early for Heathrow had a front tyre near the wear bars and heavy rain forecast. Rather than drive on it and hope, they had us out at eleven at night. Wet grip falls away as tread depth does, whatever the label once said.
Yes. The grading belongs to the tyre model and size rather than your individual tyre, so what is moulded on the sidewall is enough to look it up. Read us the size and the pattern name and we can tell you what is on the car.
No, and the label never says so. The test is done on a new tyre. As the grooves get shallower there is less room for water to go, so wet braking falls off steadily. A tyre graded A when new does not stop like an A once worn.
Those trips are the argument for it, not against it. Short journeys here happen mostly in the dark half of the year, on wet roads, at speeds where the stop is decided in a few metres.
Then you get told, and you choose. Sometimes moving now matters more than anything, and we fit what we have and note what it is. Waiting for the match is also a reasonable answer at three in the morning.
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