Looking for summer tire recommendations
 

Daily driving/spirted driving. Currently on all seasons.

I had Firehawks 500's before. No complaints about them but I would like a bit more dry grip.

I really don't care about how long the tire lasts or how much noise it makes or how uncomfortable the ride is. I also need to not die in the rain.

I could just go with PS4 but they are pretty much at the top of my budget. I've also considered the PS5 but literally no no found to be found.

I've considered some Continental sportcontact 7 but they are literally no where to be found and 6 is out of stock everywhere.

I thought about Falken FK510's but I've read that they are not responive/poor feedback which is something I want to avoid.

Ventus V12 Evo2 is something I am considering but don't seem to be quite what I am looking for dry grip wise.

Federal 595 RS-R seems to be right up my alley but I am looking for other suggestions.

Continental Extremecontact Sport

Slightly cheaper then ps4s, comparable performance with a softer sidewall and a little less longevity. I wouldn’t bother with the rest of your list, ECS or PS4S all the way.

Regarding Conti ECS, they're great and all but if you don't care how uncomfortable the ride is and are concerned about tires that aren't responsive, you might look elsewhere.

Want more dry grip, don't care about life, don't care about ride comfort, want some wet grip, I'd go either Yok A052 or B'stone RE71RS and replace them before you get past half tread depth.

Falken Azenis 615K+
I've run these for 4 years and I love them. They actually perform much better in the rain than i thought they would and they aren't bad on wear.

Yep, 200tw category is excellent. The Falken RT660 is another great option for less. It will be down on rain performance to the other two, but I've never had problems with mine on either car. Hankook RS4 and Conti ECForce are other great options too with less grip, but more tread life. I've got the Conti on the Miata currently and love it.

I am quite happy with the Yokohama advan sport V105s I got cheap last year.

More grip than stock, stiff sidewalls, still playful on the street. They were competition with the pilot supersport 2014 era tire tech. V105s were said to give more feedback than the PSS.

I ran PS4S prior and they didn't feel as grippy but in my case they were considerably cheaper.

I've heard Bridgestone Potenza Sports are pretty responsive and grip is pretty good when warmed up, but will have less life than PS4s. Since you don't care how long they last that's fine. They are also cheaper and if you have a Costco near you, they are currently running a $150 sale, although if you're not running stock size, that probably won't work.

I've had Ventus V12 Evo2 on my FRS for 12k miles. I've tracked them a couple of times. Still a few miles left in them. Very good on dry pavement. I don't generally do any spirited driving in the rain but they did fairly well when it rained at the track.


I have the Federal 595s (245/45 on 17x9 wheels) as my "track tire". Very happy with them so far. I have not driven them on wet pavement and probably don't want to.

I had Ventus V2 Evo2 tires before Indy500s and now I'm on Hankook RS4. I find the RS4's are better overall in nearly all categories when street driving and of course way more grip on the track. Less road noise, more comfortable, more wet grip. The only down side is less cold dry grip.

Does that include treadwear? I would imagine an Extreme/200TW tire to sacrifice quite a bit vs. UHP/Max tire.

If you aren't tracking it, I'd just go with the Conti ECS and call it a day.

As for the rain, I don't know why this continues to be a topic of discussion, if it's raining so hard you are losing grip the appropriate course of action is to SLOW DOWN and drive to the conditions.

We never had problems doing track days on RComps in the rain and wet. But obviously the lap times weren't as fast.

I think a lot of people feel "summer tires" are like slicks and hitting a small puddle will spin off the road into another dimension

On my third set of Conti ECS and haven’t found anything better yet.

;I recently switched to Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 Connect. They're more on track tire side of spectrums but gosh, they blew me out of water. I didn't know this car is capable of cornering at such speeds and I don't even have wide tires - 225/40r18. It's literally neck snapping experience on corners. They have few track tire caveats like necessity to warm them up a bit before they work fine but I'm able to get them to decent temps in about 10 min of more spirited highway driving. Also they're pretty bad at wet but in a good way - you can slide around and clutch kick into drift quite easily even at low, safe speeds. I'm daily driving them without any issues in rain. Just don't floor it lol.

I have Federal 595RS-R on NB Miata and I have mixed feelings about them. They're far less grippy in dry and wet performance is... weird. I mean it's kinda okay? but due to tread pattern they act weird when you hit puddle - I was driving once in heavy rain and when I hit puddle with one wheel it almost ripped steering wheel out of my hands. They didn't loose traction but standing water slowed them down so violently that whole car was thrown out of balance. It felt like hitting some solid obstacle on road rather than puddle. Basically Michelin has more conventional tread pattern that reacts less violently to puddles than fancy V shaped Federal tread that gets rid of standing water really violently which results in kicking car out of balance. It's possible to get used to it but first time it happened I had my pants full ngl... Not pleasant experience.

I think wet weather use is a fair concern for a street driven vehicle. It's easy enough to say, "Just slow down," but when you find yourself in a sudden torrential downpour on the highway, and are surrounded by trucks that don't need to be concerned about hydroplaning, and are flying past you at 80 MPH, slowing down to 50 is a great way to die... as is pulling onto the shoulder.

I, for one, have yet to experience a 200TW tire that could offer anything close to the kind of wet weather traction (especially through deeper sheeting water) that I get from my Pilot Sport 4S. I simply have no interest in tossing 200TW tires onto a vehicle I am going to drive in all sorts of conditions on public roads - specifically because I don't want to worry about how they'll deal with an unexpected encounter with that annoying wet stuff.

Having been caught in an Illinois rainstorm in August at a White vs Red Sox game where puddles were over a foot deep by the time I got to the car, I understand where you're coming from.

Given my local climate a 200TW tire will outperform PS4S or ECS 99.999% of the time here. The 0.001% is the singular deep puddle I might hit during a rainstorm 2-3x per year, and I can usually avoid it by changing lanes and driving slower solves the hydroplaning 'out of control' issue. It all varies.

Definitely nice to live in such a dry climate. I live in IL, so I don't have the luxury of being able to more or less ignore wet performance, lol. Here we switch from 200TW to PS4S for autocross if it's a particularly rainy day, as the PS4S will actually allow you to complete an autocross run without taking out entire walls of cones, lol.

The worst tire I've driven in the rain were the Rival S1.5. Those were straight up terrifying. They're known to be so, but I didn't expect it as bad is it was. Got caught out in a quick rainstorm a couple of times and was doing 35 mph on the highway when everyone else was able to do 65-70. Any more and the car was floating.

That was not my experience with other 200 tw tires. I've owned 5 different 200 tw tires and the others have all been fine in the wet. At full tread depth they're acceptable at hydroplaning resistance, I find myself with more confidence on them than the stock Primacys in the wet. As long as you keep in mind that they are not the best and stick to the speed of traffic, they're fine. In damp conditions, they seem to offer more grip than the max summer tires I've owned.

I recently switched to Goodyear Eagle F1s, which you may or may not also consider.

They're a more comfortable tyre, a bit quieter than the Primacies, with higher grip levels and good tread life. I found them to make the car a tad numb around dead center, especially at higher speeds (and being that there's a german Autobahn 10 miles from home, that matters somewhat).

Good grip though, and not too expensive. Lighter than the Primacies, too. But I miss the stock ability to feel the car move around at reasonable speeds.

Conti ECS's aren't a 200TW tire. They are 340TW with excellent wet weather reviews.

You're being incredibly hyperbolic.

I never said the Conti ECS was a 200TW tire. I should have omitted your first sentence from my quote. I had no issue with that recommendation.

Really, I only took issue with this part of your response:

OP in this thread was asking about a daily tire. The blanket response of, "If rain is an issue, just slow down," is a rather ignorant statement to make to someone who is actually being smart and considering ALL of their potential use cases. It's a LOT easier to deal with poor weather conditions on a race track than it is on public roads. My statements about wet weather use aren't hyperbolic in ANY way.

I have quite literally, been in the exact situation I described. I-81 in the mountains of Virginia, a 2-lane highway with narrow shoulders, a sudden absolutely TORRENTIAL downpour out of nowhere, but surrounded by trucks that were literally still doing 70+ MPH. It was genuinely butt-clenching, and of course there were several miles with no exit. I have never been as impressed with a tire as I was with what, at the time I think were Pilot Super Sports, doing their utmost to deal with the deluge of water running across the road until I made it to the next exit, where I actually DID pull over to get gas before I wound up in the guardrail.

Also, I've autocrossed back-to-back at the same, extremely wet event in a vehicle with A052s (my dumb-ass who was too lazy to swap tires), and a vehicle with MPSS (a similarly-classed Miata), and the difference was that the steering wheel in the Miata actually did things anywhere where there was standing water, whereas mine was useless around half the course. So yes, you certainly can do track days on RComps, as you stated, in the rain. Similarly, there are people who insist that they've driven through snow storms on summer tires without issue. That doesn't mean, "Just slow down and summer tires are fine in the snow," is an intelligent statement to make.

TL;DR "SLOW DOWN" is definitely good advice in the wet, but simply slowing down still won't fix the fact that some tires are arguably not nearly as well-suited for a vehicle that may be driven in inclement weather on public roads with any regularity.

There's a *wide* range of different Goodyear Eagle F1 tires, ranging from 500tw all-seasons to 100tw track tires. Which ones are you on?

Asymmetric 3s ;)

I have those on my car, works well on the roads, but Sidewalls are very soft for track driving, though they hold up surprisingly well there. Ive been looking at assymetric 6 as a replacement all round tyre, seems like a much much better tyre, the 3s are a Pretty old design by now.

It must depend on the load rating as well. Mine are 87s, being the lightest ones, but 91s may have a stiffer sidewall.

I went with 3s as the 5s didn't have such great reviews and the 6s weren't out yet.

I have the 91s, they have wear marks on the side wall half way down to the rim edge, though thats from very hard track driving. If they would ever die it would be nice so I finally could change tyres :), the 6s have had some.stellar reviews.