Originally Posted by TTT
After doing some research on the topic, my previous statment (the post right above this one) is incorrect. The greater contact surface of the tire only helps with inequal road conditions, as someone stated before. I still believe that if the road conditions were the same in each place, a wider tire would not help for straight line traction. Now, another reason to put some huge drag slicks on is to be able to handle the car off the launch. Weight distribution is not perfectly equal across a drag car, and again road conditions are different, so one tire may loose more traction than the other tire, causing the car to shoot off toward a wall or something. You've seen it before. The wider tires on those cars help gain control back from something like that.
so if I launch at 5k on donuts up front, or I launch with a set of beefy tires, you mean to tell me that I will get the same traction because of weight. A wider tire distributes heat and weight over a great surface area, which produces more traction.