I Love My Summer Tires
Posted: April 5th, 2010 | Author: Bret Kuhns | Filed under: Cars | Tags: car, summer tires, tires | 3 Comments »
Bridgestone Potenza RE-01R tires provide oodles of grip.
I absolutely love “Extreme Performance” summer tires! Last year I put my snow tires on early after noticing the extra wear on my summer tires, hoping to save the tread for this summer. I finally got my set of Bridgestone Potenza RE-01R’s back on last night and I am absolutely floored at the difference in my car. I completely forgot the level of grip these tires provide. It is literally a night and day difference, every aspect of my car’s performance has improved. The stock alloys my Potenzas are mounted on are lighter than the snow tires’ steel wheels, so the car accelerates faster. The lateral grip blows the snow tires out of the water (comparison accelerometer log coming soon!) with an amazing improvement in steering response and highway straight-line stability courtesy of rock-solid sidewalls. But most importantly, the car now tugs at your face a bit in a hard stop.
If you’re driving a performance car without performance tires, you’re absolutely insane. It’s impossible to describe the feeling of confidence you get in the car when you can feel it so firmly planted to the ground. Imagine running around wearing bowling shoes versus a good pair of tennis shoes. That’s how drastic a difference I feel with these tires. Now I just need the money for R-compound tires…
I’m always hearing talk about summer and winter tires. I take it the market isn’t so hot for Spring and Fall tires?
I used to have some Goodyears once that had this large groove down the middle. Notice they don’t sell those anymore? Yeah, the advertising said that they took rain into that groove and displaced it rather well. Sure, it did that and all was fantastic.
And then it snowed. And when it snowed, it locked ice in the middle groove. That meant I was sliding all over the place. Lousy tires.
I’ve learned you can never trust the “all season” branding on some tires. There are a handful of all-seasons with the large circumferential channel (or usually two channels) in the center like your Goodyears. As you said, this is terrible in snow and on ice. The RE-01R is specifically a summer tire and would never handle even light amounts of snow, so the channels work.
I have a set of unstudded General Altimax Artic snow tires which were bafflingly cheap and provide as good performance as my Blizzak WS-60’s and Nokian Hakkapelitta 2’s did in the past with my other cars. One important aspect to a good snow tread design is to never introduce longitudinal grooves of any length for the snow/ice to creep into. You’ll notice the majority of top winter tread blocks form diagonal patterns for that reason. Throw in some good siping with soft & jagged tread blocks and you’ve got yourself an awesome snow tire. Can be a bit squirrelly on dry pavement at highway speeds, but you wont’ be flinching in the worst of lake-effect storms we get in Ohio.