Tyre recommendations...?

I'm a great fan of Continental Tyres. Black Circles seem to have the Conti Premium Contact 2 at £64 fitted inc of VAT, valve and balance and that's one of their recommended tyres. The mail order price is £49.93 if you want to fit them yourself or have someone else do it.

Tony

I'll second the vote for Continental PremiumContact2's. They are great all-round tyres, dry and wet, at least on a 97 Primera. Hydragrips will be marginally better possibly in the wet but nowhere as good in the dry. Any better wet performance will be purely on roads with standing water where one ought to slow down quite a lot anyway as you never know how deep the water is. Contis are great on normal damp or wet roads. Vredestein Ultracs would be a good alternative, they're excellent wet and dry.

In message , Steve B writes

Thirded! Got them on my wife's Yaris and now on my Focus. On my Focus they seem to be performing better and lasting longer than the Michelin Pilot Primacy's that I had on previously.

Agree with the quality of Premium Contact 2s , but I can't get decent life out of them. On my 206 they consistently gave me 8-10,000 miles less than BF Goodrich, although they did grip marginally better.

On my new Touran I've got Sport Contacts. Brilliant grip but don't appear to be lasting too well. If the fronts make it past 20k I'll consider another pair. If not, I'll go for Bridgestone Turanzas which I put on my wife's Fusion, really impressed with them on that.

I get 20k front 40k rear on Contis/Primera. I'm quite happy with that and I've never had more than 24k front with any tyre from Dunlop, Goodyear, Uniroyal and a lot less grip.

Uniroyal are certainly not renowned for longevity, and the Dunlops (SP2000?) I had on a 307 SW were dire for wet grip. A set of Premium Contact 2s on that transformed the car. You wonder why Peugeot put such crap on them from new?

With my relaxed style of driving, anything over 20k on the Touran will be acceptable.

On Tue, 21 Oct 2008 18:31:34 +0100, I waved a wand and this message magically appears in front of Steve B:

I just switched all four of my tyres on my Audi cabriolet 2.6 V6 from "cheap-ass" Heros to Continental Premimum Contact 2s. The difference betweeen these two makes really does stand out, especially in the wet. My wallet's now depleted to the tune of 208 quid, as I got a good deal.

Conti PremiumContact 2's it is, then. My friendly local independent tyre place is going to put them on when he comes back off his hols a week Monday.

Thanks for all the advice.

A follow up question... the current tyres were all new at the same time. I swapped the fronts to the back a while ago. Three of the tyres are now down to the wear markers, but the fourth (which has been on the offside front for maybe four months) still has about 2-3mm extra tread over all the others.

Can anybody explain how that could happen so markedly? The wear is even all over the tread, it's not that the outside edge isn't touching the road.

Hydragrip won the test with the Vredestein Sportrac3 a close second. The Conti, as several others have recommended is a very good all rounder but expensive both to buy and run because rolling resistance is very high.

I look for the best wet weather grip in tyre tests because there really isn't much difference in the dry between top brands and most drivers will bottle out before the tyre actually loses grip anyway. Also to be born in mind is modern tyres are so damn good compared to even 20 years ago we now have as much wet grip with the best tyres as we had dry grip back then. The Pirelli P7 which was the dog's danglies when it came out is now last in the above test which tells you how far things have improved. Any decent modern tyre is a quantum leap over what I had to endure when I started driving in the 70s. I remember spinning a Capri on a roundabout in the wet at very modest speed because wet grip was almost non existant. Mind you Capris were s**te in the wet, mainly at the back end, regardless of what tyres you put on them which didn't help.

Nowadays I can hurl my Focus about in the wet, even on its nearly bald Primacies, with almost total disregard for the conditions. A new set of Goodyear F1s or Hydragrips would no doubt improve things a lot further still.

Given the cost saving of the Hydragrip over the Contis plus the better wet grip I'd certainly give them a try. To be honest though you'll probably be quite happy whatever you choose because none of them are really bad tyres these days.

Nearside tyres wear more because:

1) In general, we don't corner as fast when turning to the left. It feels safer cornering to the right, where the passenger is in more potential danger than the driver.

2) Road camber makes us steer slightly to the right, loading up the nearside tyres ever so slightly.

John

You make some interesting points. I wonder how much truth there is in Goodyears advertising blurb about the hydragrips - that they are a bit better when new but much better over the full tread life compared to other brands? I can see how the 3-D design of the tread could be made to still work well as it wore, or not if you didn't take care with it.

I had Woosung 'Dark Horse' tyres on my Carlton - They would spin at the slightest provocation in the wet. Teflon tyres, they were. I switched those to Maxxis VA-1's (? I think-can't find them now anyway) which were also a budget tyre but they wee orders of magnitude better.

I'll stick with the Contis for this time round and see how they get on...