How much rubber is on a low profile tire? What is the width of the rubber? Also, how wide should a good handling supercar's tires be?
What size? There are over 1,700 different tire sizes on the market for passenger cars and light trucks alone. You need to be more specific.
Mustang GT - 245/45/17. 9 to 9.5 inches. Width, tread design and pressure dictate good Slalom handling./
Mine uses 45 in the front and 40 in the rear. Front is 9 1/2" the rear 11". Goodyear Eagle F-1. Great tire. Quiet , great in rain. Keep them at 30 psi.
A low profile tire is generally considered anything in a 50 series or less. So, how wide is a low profile tire? Well, an 8 inch wide low profile tire will be 8 inches wide. A 9 inch wide low profile tire will be 9 inches wide. A 10 inch low profile tire... well, you can probably already see a pattern developing there. In short, the tire's profile may be measured in relation to the width, but they are not really connected. How much rubber is on a low profile tire? This will depend on the specific tire, and what you mean by "how much." If you are referring to tread depth, most street tires will be around 8-12/32" with competition radials coming in around 6-8/32" for dry running. If you mean total area, then π times the tire's diameter times the width will give you the surface area; multiply that by the tread depth if you want the total volume of rubber used in the tread... etc. How wide should a good handling supercar's tires be? Again, this depends on the specifics. The car's weight distribution, drive train properties, suspension geomtry and setup, the specifics tires, and what the goals of the design engineers are (ie, is on track performance more important than drivability on the street and to what degree, are there government mandates in terms of milage that much be met, etc etc). But, as a generalization, more contact area means better performance, so wider is better. But there are limits... one of the biggest will that the wider your front tires get, the slip angle at which they will work becomes less and less. And in terms of balance, while you can generally run at least somewhat wider in the rear, this will eventually contriubte to unbalancing the car if this difference becomes too great.
