Summer tires yet?

did mine last night. wow, I forgot what actual wheels and performance tires feel like....coming from the blizzaks and stock wheels!!:yumyum: :yumyum: :yumyum:

 

Doing mine today. Winter tires were getting lazy about stopping - kinda dangerous.

 

Mine went on on Sunday! Weeeeeeeeeeee! Glad to have the 'ol wagon back up to speed. Driving around on dry pavement on WS-50 Blizzaks was getting really old.

Steve

 

Man, even I'm getting tired of me saying this, but that's another reason the Hakkas kick Blizzak ass. Even at 50-60F temps on dry roads they're stable and grippy. Not like summer tires, but a lot like a decent set of all-seasons.

 

The Blizzaks are designed such that the outer layer is a very soft, open celled rubber that provides a lot of grip on ice. If you run them year round, what happens is that your burn off that layer very fast, and you are essentially left with a fairly open-tread pattern all-season. You give up a lot of ice grip at that point, but the snow is still ok.

Dry and warm, well, you're sacrificing a lot of traction over even a good all-season tire, and you've got nothing like the traction that those of us with dedicated summer tires have.

vs.

Not even close.

 

"fairly well" is the key phrase. They are designed as a performance snow tire and compromise many things to cover that moniker. They do not excel at anything, but work 'fairly well' at many things.

I run the LM22 in the winter and personally, I think they are the crappiest winter tires I have ever driven on! Now, that must be put into perspective... They are a pretty good 'dry' tire, in the winter...they are 'not so great' in the snow or on the ice, for a winter tire. That is where I have a problem. In the winter I want winter tires and the rest of the year I want performance tires. In the end, I bought the tires and they are what they are so I am to blame for the purchase, but I will not buy them again. The Hakkas that I previously ran were significantly better on snow or ice, but they were about on par in the dry. I don't feel the LM22 really hit what they were going for....if they were better in the dry or better in the snow I would be in agreement of their 'performance snow tire' claim.

You appear to be happy with what you have right now, but I bet you would be even happier to have perfromance (or even good all season) tires in the non-winter months. Once, that is, you got over the chuck of cash you had to throw down to get the experience.... :wiggle:

I will be ecstatic once I get the KXs (not my favorite tire either) back on this weekend!

Maybe I should quit trying new tires, I seem to make bad choices.

 

Dunlop Wintersport M3s. By far the best performance winter tire out there. The wet and dry grip is above and beyond the LM22. I did the winter BMW CCA day with those and have nothing but more respect for them after that. They aren't the best in deep snow though.

Anyway, summers should be going on this weekend.

 

How do you guys gauge the difference between good and not good winter tires? I bought a set of pretty inexpensive all seasons for the winter that seem to work well, but you speak as though the differences are really obvious. I'm just not sure I'd know what to expect from a better tire? Saying one handles better than another based on an incident or two seems unfair and subjective, as it's unlikely the conditions are identical.

 

Well, if you're looking at performance in a competitive area, certain tires become obvious performers. Falken Azenis are favorites of Auto-Xers for their stickyness when cold, but track guys find they get too greasy when pused at high speeds.

For snow, you have to look to rally, where the Hakkas are the top regular tire (the top teams use some rally-specific snow tires and ice tires (different) that are uber expensive and generally have to be shipped in from Europe). Blizzaks are a distant second. Dunlop/Yokohama (excepting the rally-specific tires) aren't even in the running.

As a general rule, you get what you pay for too. If you expect a $100 tire to perform like a $250 tire, you're not going to find it. But a $150 tire might give you 95% of what the $250 tire does. The gains tend to get smaller as you go up.

Also, the real key is what do you want in a tire? If you want a tire that will last a long time, you'll give up on traction. If you want a tire that will grip well in the wet, you'll give up traction on dry pavement, if you want a tire that will grip well on ice, you tend to give up deep snow perfromance and vice versa. If you want a tire that will grip well in acceleration, you usually lose some turning ability (drag slicks suck for turning), a great turning tire may have less accelerating and braking traction.

As I said, the key is understanding what you want them to do.

Maybe you want to spend $100/tire once every 6 years and not $250/tire for four sets (two summer sets, 2 winter sets) in the same time period. That's perfectly valid. I mean $400 vs $4,000 is a big deal.

 

I own a set of Wintersport M3's and I think they are absolute garbage in every category except for tread wear. IMO they suck and they just won't die. At ice racing I rode in and drove cars with Blizzaks and with Nokians and I must say I was much more impressed with both of those tires(at least in the snow and on the ice...never driven the other 2 on pavement).

 

i am putting mine on soon, maybe this weekend. i wanna save my nokians as along as i can. it pains me to hear these groan under hard turn on 40* days. but i am fearful of a early spring snow or lots of rain cause my all season have about 0 tread depth on em lol.

 

Thanks for taking the time to write this up, it really points me to making good decisions.

 

I finally got mine on today.

 

Finally! Are you patient, Busy, or just plain lazy? I have no patience so they have been on for a month now. I'm not gonna lie a few morning have been a bit scary at times though.

 

My summer tires never come off :biggrin:

 

All of the above..... mostly very busy and also had to wait for them to come back from power coating. Then all these threats of snow.