BTW true performance tires are soft and not made to last long.
Check out the Cooper Zeon RS3-S. The 245/40/17’s are W rated. I had these on my 94 Cobra when I sold it. They are a really good looking tire with a lot of grip and they run quiet too. These also do very well in the rain. Tread Depot has the 245/40/17’s for $113 a piece and Cooper has a $60 rebate going now. http://www.treaddepot.com/group/zrs3s.html
All-season = No-season
when I had nice cars I had nice tires 
as my dad taught me young its one thing to buy a nice car its another to keep it maintained and that includes tires and brakes etc…
part of the cost of nice cars IMHO 
would be silly to put cheaper tires on and not be able to feel and use the car the way it was meant
When you buy garbage all seasons that is absolutely true. As with anything you get what you pay for. And when it comes to good tires you pay…
All seasons suck. If you have a performance car, you need good performance tires especially if you plan on pushing the car at all. I run Yokohama YK580s and have been pretty happy with their street performance on the curvy mountain roads I like to play on. I found Tire Rack tests and reviews to be very helpful when shopping for new rubber. For me and my GTI it was down to the Yokos or the Continental ExtremeContacts. I should add, the YK580s suck in the snow even though Yokohama claims they are a “all season”. They would be the ragged edge of “all season” as long as that means spring, summer and early fall.
I need to start shopping for a winter performance tire soon. I had a set of Continental Extreme Winter Contacts on a modded 2010 MazdaSpeed 3. Under full boost (18-20psi) in first and second gears I got great traction in several inches of slick, wet snow. May go back to them. \
Good luck, tires are about as personal as gun choices.
I currently drive the funest FWD shitbox you can buy, a Volkswagen GTI, and I can’t wait to put better tires on it. I too am in FL and these all season tires suck donkey balls.
Yea I wouldn’t say they’re a great winter tire.
You’re “supposed” to run winter specific tires if your average winter temp is lower than 45 degrees.
The DWS is actually pretty good in snow but living in the South now I probably won’t re buy them.
Summer tires and true performance tires are great but they aren’t a daily driver tire. They suck in the rain and they wear out. For example NITTO invos are exellent on Corvettes but most people who own one don’t daily drive it.
Summer driving = summer tires. I don’t drive in “all seasons”, so I don’t need “all season” tires, nor would I want to sacrifice the performance that such compromise entails. It would be dumb to put all-season tires on a car that isn’t driven in all seasons. The S-04s do OK in the rain, certainly better (and quieter) than the POTENZA RE050A’s that came stock on the vehicle. As to cost and wear…if I can’t afford the tires that allow the vehicle to be driven to it’s potential, then I should have bought a cheaper, low-performance vehicle where the tires don’t matter so much. The cost of tires is a factor that the car buyer should take into account when he’s trying to decide if he can afford the car, along with gas mileage, maintenance costs, and insurance. I did.
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Don’t confuse a performance all season tire with a touring all season. Your right about not buying what you can’t afford. That’s something lost on many people.
Most summer tires don’t handle rain well. Having proper sipeing on a tire is import for wet weather. For example the tire you would want to drive on in Arizona summer most likely won’t be what you want to drive in FL summer.
The roads are dry here in the summer far more often than they’re wet. The Potenza S-04s work OK in the rain, work fantastic on dry pavement so that’s my choice. I’ve had no reason to regret it. If it’s raining that hard, I’ll just take the Sierra.
The Potenza RE-950s run really well in the rain and wet. I drove the S-40 Volvo through tons of rain this last month and it never slid around. Volvo’s winter traction mode also helps with that.
Right, but OP says it rains daily in FL. Idk how much but if its like Carolina weather is just a sprinkles. Not much to worry about clearing water.
Michelin Pilot Super Sports are the best street tires you can get now. Very grippy and have good life. Theres a reason they are the standard tire on a lot of high end performance cars. They are a little more expensive than Conti DW and Bridgestone S04s. If you dont want to spend that much you can go to the DW and S04s and get 80-90% of Michelin PSS performance
And they have a mileage warrenty that’s covered by the manufacturer and road side service from the manufacturer. The only thing is if they’re mounted on a staggered set up they only cover half of the guarantee.
Yes…the Pilot Super Sports are not cheap but they are real grippy and do well in the rain and last a long time.
We are currently running those on the wife’s 2005 Saab 9-5 Areo and they are quiet, ride well and are very predictable.
Performance tires for the street are somewhat silly especially on a sedan. Putting performance tires on a BMW 750 seems nuts. The speed rating is important to adhere to, but the soft ultra high performance tires are a waste of money. On top of that the wet road performance of some of these tires is not very good.
For some sports cars and high performance sedans the only tires that will fit are the ultra high performance tires.
If you are going to do some informal auto cross maybe they make sense. But most people who own these cars are not great drivers, have never been to driving schools, and wouldn’t know how to make their cars go fast on any given twisty road. I live in a very affluent area, BMWs, Mercedes, Porsches, Ferraris, Lamborghini’s, and a host of other “performance” luxury cars, and American sports cars. Most of them do not really know how to drive, it is all about status. Most of them think they can drive because they own the performance car. Sure there are a few guys that have raced, but they are insignificant in number. Do they need performance tires for their performance sedans? Do they understand the limits of their cars, have they pushed their cars to and past the limits in different conditions? Have they been to driving schools? If not, what is the point?
Sorry if I offended anyone, but that is my experience.
Euro,
I’ve had a BMW M3 of one body type or another since about 1997 and have been through a crapload of different tires trying to find the right combination of grip, wear and traction. Had some scary moments with a '95 M3 with the original Michelins that were made for the car; phenomenal grip in the dry, warm weather but like ice skates if a drop of water hit the road, pus they were noisy and wore pretty quick. Anyway, fast forward to the 2002 M3 that I owned until two years ago and I was trying more “all season” performance tires to deal with the changing weather here in NY. Right now I am on my second set of the best all around tire I’ve ever used, the Michelin Pilot Sport A/S 3. I have not noticed any loss of cornering grip in dry weather, although mostly street driven, I am no stranger to a nice, drifting, handful of opposite lock, oversteer through the right corner or bend when the opportunity presents itself on various on/off ramps. Where this tire seperates itself from the pack is in rain and snow. I drove this car to and from work this entire winter, in up to 5 inches of unplowed snow on the roads in our development on more than one occasion. Days I wouldn’t have dreamed of even taking it out of the driveway with other “performance” tires, I was able to drive in with only the worry of others sliding into me as a concern.
It most certainly does not transform the car into a Ford Raptor off-road master, but in terms of combining dry weather performance and grip with the ability to cope easily with rain and standing water and even snow up to a reasonable point, I am hooked. They do not last a whole long time as I am assuming the tread is fairly soft to get the inclement weather grip that they do and maintain dry performance too. I am pretty hard on them, especially the rears in the RWD M3 so I went through the rear set in about 17,000 miles while the fronts went over 25,000.
Most certainly not cheap, but I budget other things to allow keeping these tires on the car for the reasons that you seem to be needing/wanting, pretty darn good dry weather performance and grip and no problem maintaining pretty high levels of grip with rain or standing water. I think it was one of TireRack’s tests that I saw intitially that got me interested as the wet weather grip was head and shoulders above competitors’ numbers.
Not even close.
We get record amounts of rainfall every day here for four months.
an extra 10 feet in braking with good tires in a panic stop can save your ass. Especially in the wet. If this wasnt the case we’d be going with the cheapest chinese tires