Hi all--

The new 1999.5 silver touch up paint does exist after all! I just got a touch-up kit for my 1999.5 silver A4. My paint color code was 0M2 Y7W (the code listed in the spare wheel well was a bit shorter I think but had the Y7W bit), which is the new silver introduced for the 99.5 models (sans the lovely blue tint on the old Aluminum Silver Metallic). The box has Audi and VW labels on it, and is labelled in German "Silbersee/Licht Silber" which (1.) explains the weird name "Lake Silver" in English, and, I think (2.) confirms that the color is the same as the silver on the VW Passat, Beetle etc.

On the spare tire front, I had been trying to find out what kind of tire was on the fullsize wheel - a conventional one-directional tire like the four mounted on the car, or a bi-directional tire like the one on my donut mini-spare. Well, at the dealer we checked an S4 and it had a right-side ONE-DIRECTIONAL tire on the full size spare. This surprises me since I've always heard that once you use a one-directional on one side of the car (presumably for any distance, even a short one) you can't safely use it on the other side. The mystery continues...

--Shane

That used to be true with radial tires that the tire manufacturers didn't want you to use them on both sides of the car. No longer is that true. It is true however that a uni-directional tire is obviously designed to be used in one direction. The downside of using it in the opposite direction of the way it was mounted for is that you aren't rotating the tire in the direction the tread was designed for, thus you probably won't have optimum traction. With a spare on Quattro though, it's probably more important to have exactly the same size tire, ergo the S4 has the same tire. I wouldn't worry too much about it, just make sure that when you do have to use a spare, to make sure you get the original replaced as soon as possible.

Gary Bonham
98.5 1.8tqms

The general and wheel/tire archives are full of detailed explanations of this issue (last week as a matter of fact). Nutshell: reversed directional tread just makes more noise and is slightly likelier to hydroplane (Yes, actual tested data [R&T]).

Many, many years ago a single monolithic tread belt was folded (laid) in one direction, with the possibility of it delaminating if it was run in the opposite direction. This rarely happened, but the belt package did sometimes shift.

Absolute non-issue.