Horizontal curves are accident-prone sections in a road network. The main type of curve-related crashes is vehicle sideway skidding, due to vehicle overspeeding, the insufficient skid resistance of wet pavement and effect of centrifugal force when a vehicle negotiating a horizontal curve. It is vital to determine the maximum safe driving speed of vehicles to ensure safe driving on wet horizontal curves. Owing to the complex interaction mechanism between tire-water-pavement and many variables involved (including curve geometric parameters, pavement surface characteristics, tire motion characteristics, water film thickness, etc.), currently there is no practical working procedure to determine the maximum safe driving speed of a vehicle on a horizontal curve under wet weather condition by skid resistance simulation. Based on solid mechanics and fluid mechanics, a coupled tire-fluid-pavement cornering skid resistance simulation model was established, and the prediction accuracy of the model was verified according to skid resistance test values. By the skid resistance simulation model and the mechanism analysis of sideway skidding, the maximum safe driving speeds of the verified asphalt pavement under different curve radii, superelevation rates and water film thicknesses were obtained, and these calculated safe driving speeds were compared with American Association of State Highway and Transportation (AASHTO) design speeds. The results show that the existing design speed specification does not fully consider the rainy environmental factors, and the vehicle will slip sideways at the AASHTO design speed under heavy rainfall intensity. The results validates the effectiveness of the approach of calculating the maximum safe speed by skid resistance simulation model in identifying the rainy conditions and low skid resistance pavement surface with high skidding risk. And the approach can also provide a new method for pavement skid resistance management and mixture design.