Will having two different tire treads do anything to my car?

Well as I said in an earlier post, the very same day I got 2 new tyres which I was trying to argue about with the mechanic at the shop should go at the rear, but he was giving me the same arguments you're giving, the front does the steering and the power, it's more important to have a grippy front, bla bla, all the while having a Michelin guidelines for safety poster right in the garage, where it clearly said newer tyres should go to the rear axle!

In any case, off I went with my fresh rubber at the front and half worn tyres at the back. Driving 250 km back to college.
Obviously it'd been raining and the surface of the road was damp, and while taking an exit from a highway, a left turn as I remember, the back end just snapped away, no warning, no feel at all. Since I was young and rather unexperienced I tapped the brakes and tried countersteering, but it did nothing and because it was an exit it meant it was narrow and had guard rails at either side. So I crashed into the left one. Luckily it was mostly cosmetic damage and a broken turn signal & headlight, I was travelling at 40 kph at most.
 
If you've taken advanced driving classes and correcting oversteer comes as second nature to you then go ahead and ignore the tyre manufacturer's advises.

Like I said before its highly dependant on your car, in the case of my old Buick the understeer was so bad normally that creating a possible oversteer condition made the car actually handle better.

One thing that I agree with is that with FWD an average driver would have a very hard time controlling/recovering oversteer. There is also the fact that most of your weight will be on the front tires you should technically have more traction even with less tread.

I don't know if I would agree with putting them on RWD/AWD as the former tends to give plenty of communication to anyone who can actually drive and the former tends to do a very good job of managing traction and will simply shuffle torque around until traction is somewhat equalized between different wheels no matter the condition.
 
Also don't forget the saying: "Understeer is when the driver is scared, oversteer is when the passenger is scared." :p

and this:


"Oversteer is best because you don't see the tree that kills you." :lol:

I would much rather have to deal with oversteer than understeer in the snow, because if you're understeering in a corner with snow on the road, most probably your going to hit the curb and ruin your suspension, tires, and wheels. Sure, the same thing can happen when you oversteer, but (for me at least) it is much easier to control oversteer because of my natural instincts (and from playing LFS and GT5 alot...:p).
 
I would much rather have to deal with oversteer than understeer in the snow, because if you're understeering in a corner with snow on the road, most probably your going to hit the curb and ruin your suspension, tires, and wheels.
Don't forget parked cars that I have before NARROWLY avoided in snow because of massive understeer (yeah AWD helps but doesn't save you when there is 0 traction). Funnily enough I tend to pull the e-brake to kill understeer in those situations.

My natural instinct is: "When in doubt, throttle out" so I prefer over to under :)
 
A drop of water would cause my Mustang to snap oversteer. Only once did I spin out. Years of driving land yachts helped me develop the instinct of letting off the gas and counter steering.
 
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