Good point

 

I may consider a set of 235/40/18's so perhaps it makes sense to try and work out a deal ? Please let me know if this is a possibility.

Thanks !

 

These tires are probably stickier but I highly doubt they have any effective wet weather capabilities.

 

which might be enough to sway me were I in that market.

What about the Michelin Sport Cup or Pirelli's Corsa, both of which tires find temselves on things like Ferraris, Lambos and the like?

BTW, the wider profile won't put any more rubber on the road. It merely shortens the contact patch which can allow the manufacturer to use even softer rubber and preserve reasonable wear rates.

All of the performance advantage of wider tires comes from the shorter contact patch allowing softer rubber to beused in the tread area and stiffer sidewalls allowing you to put that extra grip to good use. The actual coefficient of friction improvement can only come from the softer compounding the wider tire permits (less tread heating due to the short contact patch).

The total friction is always proportional to load and contact patch area, as one goes up the other goes down netting zero change (within limits). This is how heavier cars like the Enzo can perform essentially identically to lightweights like the Elise (check the numbers: the 3,000 lb Enzo drives like the 2,000 lb Elise....).

You may also note that the actual manufactures of the tires never claim that wider tires put more rubber on the road. Michelin goes so far as to claim (superfluously and in a somewhat misleading way) that their PS 2 changes the shape of the contact patch under hard cornering to deliver more grip (and what tire doesn't?). However, they also use differential compounding so the Cf of the tread compound varies across the tread meaning that Michelin can make their PS2 perform much better than you would expect from a single compound tread. This is also how Michelin does that neat trick with their A/S series of all season high performance tires. Bridgestone uses differential tread compounding also in their Pole Position series though they vary the compounding with tread depth to preserve handling characteristics as the tread wears down.

I think Yoko just uses gum eraser all the way across and all the way down, as do Michelin and Pirelli for their insane tire category (well you have high performance, ultra high perforamce and extreme performance, so there has to be another even higher category for the really crazy rubber.)

 

in a recent issue they tested the Kuhmo R compound tires against other levels of tire and found that the R compound stuck pretty well on merely wet roads. It seems the distinction needs to be made between wet weather perforamce where the tire has to clear standing water from the contact patch area before there's any road surface to grip and the grip of the rubber on the wet road surface.

F1 cars change to intermediates when there is standing water on the track and only to full wets when the rain is heavy enough to have standingwater everywhere.

Fundamentally, the tread compound either grips a wet road or doesn't (operating temperature is the main factor here) and the tread pattern is pretty much irrelevant unless the standing water is thick enough to hydroplane a portion of the slick tire. After all, even after a "rain " tire has cleared the water, through the grooves and othe rvoids in the tread, the remaining road surface the rest of the tread sticks to is still cold and wet.

 

Apparently, according to Top Gear's interviews with a Ferarri test driver (the source ws not specifically named) the Ferrari's do better on Pirellis. They use Bridgestones for marketing reasons, the Pirelli is a better tire, for those Ferraris.

 

I don't know how the Tirerack can tell me that the RE-01R is 20-25% better than the ADVAN in the <b>wet</B> because their own test says otherwise.

Regardless both tires are really good and in the end it seems that the RE-01R comes up on top. At $50.00 less per tire (in a 245/40/17), I think I'll try the RE-01R. Here are the links to their test results and their test charts.


<b>TEST RESULTS</B>

http://www.tirerack.com/tires/tests/testDisplay.jsp?ttid=71

<b>TEST CHARTS</B>

http://www.tirerack.com/tires/tests/chartDisplay.jsp?ttid=71<ul><li><a href="http://www.tirerack.com/a.jsp?a=AR4&amp;url=%2Ftires%2Ftests%2FtestDisplay .jsp%3Fttid%3D71">http://www.tirerack.com/tires/tests/testDisplay.jsp?ttid=71</a></li></ul>

 

Sniffing too much burnt rubber?

 

"Unlike less highly tuned tires, Yokohama's care instructions specify that due to its compound characteristics, ADVAN Neova AD07 must be used and stored at temperatures above -10ýý Celsius (14ýý Fahrenheit) to maintain its performance and avoid tire damage."

You'd have to store these indoors over winter. The RE-01R's are probably a better choice for you in the end.

Koz.

 

All high performance tires are like that. My R compounds and the PS2s spend the winter indoors...