ALL round genius Leonardo da Vinci would have a made a good designer of tyres for today's cars, if a demonstration by tyre giant Continental is anything to go by.

The Italian brain box, who died nearly five centuries ago, had a restless mind, part of which worked out a way of measuring how much friction was generated when you pulled a piece of wood over a rough surface.

That bit of kit went nowhere as clever Leo concentrated on other projects - painting the Mona Lisa or drawing what became today's military tank, for instance.

But something in the spirit of that original device is used by Continental when it develops a new tyre.

A tyre like the new Continental SportContact6, being made in enough sizes to satisfy the owners of very fast and sporty cars who want some rubber that beats the best of what went before and will make their precious transport still more fun to drive.

That is no easy order. The new SportContact6 has to be safe when supporting two tonnes of vastly powerful Mercedes-Benz limo with four captains of industry sitting in its softly leathered seats.

It must also bring a smile to the face of Porsche drivers who fancy of bit of enthusiastic wheel work on the way home after a bad day in the office.

And it also must be safe when the car ahead brakes suddenly on a streaming wet road, the sort of performance that might not be glamorous but earns massive respect if you save a front bumper (or more) from destruction.

This sort of performance takes an extraordinary level of commitment from the engineers who develop the tyres (so much more than pouring rubber into moulds) and it takes more - far more - brains than you could imagine.

It is likely you have only ever heard of Continental as a maker of tyres - around one third of every new car built in Europe wears its brand.

In fact, with more than 205,000 employees in 53 countries, Continental produces everything from the rubber for the soles of Adidas trainers to electronic systems that will one day help cars drive themselves.

So, when Continental (the company also sells tyres under many different names, including Uniroyal and Semperit) launches a new tyre with its name on the sidewall, it takes things very seriously indeed.

You might call it typically German attention to detail, but the SportContact6 tyre was launched to the specialist media from around the world at an intense two-day teach-in based at the exclusive and expensive Bilster Berg Resort private test and race track a few kilometres from Paderborn, deep in rural Germany a couple of hours south of Hanover.

We learned more than you might sometimes want to know at a series of fact-intense workshops, where a special rig had been built with finely machined modern parts echoing the wood and string apparatus that da Vinci dreamed up all those centuries ago.

That was the light relief, along with sniffing a laboratory bottle of natural rubber (close to the smell of a very dirty dog, I thought) and 'building' the ideal performance tyre on a computer screen, juggling things like the amount of silica and carbon black in the mix for the tread.

The UK contingent at the event quickly came up with the perfect mix, with discreet cheating from the Continental boffins who had spent month doing the same for real.

All well and good, but the fun started when we were let loose in a series of performance cars with badges that would set a car enthusiast's heart aflutter, from VW Golf R and Mercedes A45 AMG to more than a dozen deeply lovely Porsche Cayman GTS models, which felt a bit of a steal for £55,000 after an intensive track session.

We tried the cars on a mix of the tyres you can buy (for wheels of between 19 and 23 inches; so aimed at proper performance machinery) and tyres that had been tried and rejected in the development programme.

Some were fine in the wet but made the steering too mushy for a proper performance feel, others made the car a bit unstable in an emergency stop. The production tyre, you will not be surprised to learn, was both crisp to respond to a change of direction and good at stopping the car smoothly.

There were no rival tyres for comparison (and Continental's head tyre man frankly admitted they'd make sure theirs were tops if there were) but the SportContact6 hung on to a streaming wet track like a baby limpet being pulled from its mother and never once frightened a not very expert track driver (me) even when a corner was entered far too fast.

On a dry track - the fiendish Nurburgring in Germany - the new tyre has already helped set a new record time for hot hatches, established a few weeks ago by the latest Honda Civic Turbo Type R.

Back under cover at the private race track, and away from the weather, Continental had assembled examples of some of the more outrageously modified cars specialist German firms produce that stands out in a crowd (too much, you might convincingly argue) and produce enough power to light a small city.

Names like Brabus, Schnitzer and TechArt graced machines, from a Mercedes-Benz S-Class to BMW M4 Coupe and Porsche Macan Turbo.

They all shared one feature (two, if you count lack of taste) and you've guessed it - they were all wearing new Continental SportContact6 tyres. Lucky things.