You posted earlier a link to figure 7 here, but I don't want to go find it now so here:
http://hal.archives-ouvertes.f ... 00/05/14/75/PDF/vsd05.pdf
I think you'd made a comment that your graphs are following what's happening in the top diagram. In my own tire models I frequently plot exactly what you have in the top diagram. However, I also plot the resultant force on that same graph. What you see is a line that looks very much like a pure force curve. It goes up very quickly to the point where you have total slippage in the patch and then perhaps decreases slowly.
There is never some weird combination of slip out in this area that results in a valley or saddle shape like all your graphs show.
I just whipped up a quick little proggy to take the data in the top graph of figure 7 and add it all together vectorially. Can't be bothered right now with making a 3D app to display it like you're doing, but perhaps seeing the numerical data laid out in the same manner as yours is might suffice to show that there are no such bumps or valleys along the diagonals as you're getting. Part of your argument was that your graphs reflect this particular diagram. I assure you they most certainly do not
In the top graph of figure 7 you're looking at combined slip very close to and well passed the friction limit. In other words, it's all outside in that "falling down towards a plateau" region. What I want to show here is that there is NOT a valley or a region where the combined forces suddenly drop way off at some weird combination of slip angle and slip ratio. The drop fans out in all directions in a similar manner as you go farther from the origin.
In my attachment the forces are laid out in the same manner as in your graph. The bottom right (2700) is the spike where the combined force is highest. This is slip ratio 0.1 and slip angle 0. This is pure longitudinal force. And it is the highest point on the graph along with the 2703 at slip ratio 0.2 and slip angle 0. Again, I want to point out that the highest point on the graph is right along the pure slip line. It is not off somewhere appearing as a hump in the combined area. If it were, nobody would have bothered coming up with all this friction ellipse theory stuff since it would obviously be wrong. We'd need a friction cross/bubble thing theory instead like I showed earlier.
Moving to the left the slip angles are increasing 5 degrees at a time up to 30 degrees slip angle. Moving upwards the slip ratios are increasing from 0.1 to 0.2, 0.4, and 0.8. (This is what you get when you're drifting with the wheels on fire
)
For others following along, what I'm doing is taking a point on the dotted line at say, slip angle 5 degrees, for Sx = 0.1 and adding it to the point on the solid line at the same slip angle vectorially. (Fx * Fx + Fy * Fy). So this is the total force the tire is producing at all of these combinations of slip angles and slip ratios. They correspond to the height of various spots in AndRand's combined force graphs. This says nothing at all about the actual direction of the force which is another topic entirely that we probably will not get to given how the thread is developing, unfortunately.
You'll see the same trend as in that green graph I posted earlier. Near the origin (bottom right) you have a spike, then as you move to the left and "up" the values quickly drop to a sort of plateau where they slowly continue dropping. However, along the diagonal there is no trend at all toward having any sudden upturn in force again (especially above what you get in pure slip, my goodness...) nor is there a valley along any diagonal where the forces are far lower than what you get in surrounding areas. Note that the "back row" (top row) all have pretty much the same value. It doesn't suddenly collapse to 50% or something at the top left corner like it does in some of your graphs.
Keep in mind that I am loosely eyeballing all this data reading it off the graph, so there is some noise in there. I've been writing tire models for a good 10 years now. I think my first attempt at it was in 1993 or so with nothing but Fred Puhn's "How to Make Your Car Handle" on a 386SX-16Mhz. It doesn't mean I know everything, but I'm not a noob to this stuff and do know what I'm talking about on this one