How to know if you should step up to a performance summer tire

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Any vehicle is only as good as its tires. A million-dollar supercar may have incredible power and superb suspension, but if its tires can’t grip the ground as they should, it’s completely wasted. Everything depends on a few centimetres of rubber that touch road.

For most drivers, it isn’t much of a choice. They drive on the all-season tires that come with the car. And when they buy new tires, it likely comes down to price, personal and online recommendations and the manufacturer’s reputation. For drivers of sports and performance vehicles, however, there can be more at stake if they want to push their abilities, both on public roads and on a more demanding race track.

Summer performance tires only work effectively in warmer weather, and are not recommended for use when the temperature is below 7 degrees Celsius. Below that and their soft, sticky rubber becomes hard and even brittle, and traction is severely compromised. This is why performance-oriented Canadian drivers often wait until May to remove the winter tires from their vehicle, and keep the summer tires fitted only until October.

All tire manufacturers have something to offer drivers for the summer months and the technology is constantly improving, though most come with a trade-off of some kind. Bridgestone Potenza Sports are very grippy but very stiff; Michelin Pilot Sports have a reputation for being loud on the road; Pirelli P Zeros are usually more expensive than most. No true performance tires are cheap.

The latest performance tire from Goodyear is the Eagle F1 Asymmetric 6, which has been sold in Europe and Asia since 2022. It was introduced there first because larger rim sizes were more popular in those markets, but that trend is now in North America.

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The trend is “for both looks and performance,” says David Zanzig, Goodyear’s senior director of consumer tire technology. “Over the years, we’ve been seeing an increased proliferation in sizes from the [manufacturers]. It used to be that we would just have one tire size, one fitment, for a vehicle. Now there can be five, six, even eight different sizes.”

Larger tires are usually louder while driving, but Zanzig says larger sizes of the Asymmetric 6 are fitted with sound dampening foam to quieten their ride, which also helps seal punctures up to five millimetres wide.

The Asymmetric 6 is an entirely new tire for North America. It replaced the Asymmetric 5 in Europe, but that tire was never sold here.

“This is the accumulation of years of research and technology development,” says Zanzig. “It has a new asymmetric tread design that helps us with dry handling performance and noise. It has an innovative new tread compound with advanced technology in polymers and traction resins, to maximize the rubber for road grip and wet performance, as well as tread wear. And it has a lighter weight and stronger construction – probably 5 or 10 per cent lighter than some of the other tires we have.”

So if the new tire is so great, would it benefit every driver to equip their vehicle with similar expensive rubber when they swap over from winter tires, regardless of aspirations for high performance? The Goodyear Eagle Asymmetric 6 sells for about $100 more per tire than an equivalent-sized Goodyear RS-A all-season tire – is it worth the extra money on a non-performance car for the extra braking potential?

“I would say it’s not wasted,” says Zanzig. “I would recommend it if you want to maximize your handling and braking performance in the summer months. But if you’re going to just do regular commuting or touring driving, you may not need it.”

A larger and more rigid performance tire will almost certainly create a much more jarring ride on bumpy asphalt, however. And more than that, a stiffer tire with more grip might actually wear out your car’s suspension more quickly, says Jeff McKague, the owner of the TrackMatrix performance driving school based at Ontario’s Canadian Tire Motorsports Park north of Bowmanville, and the Grand Bend Motoplex.

“There’s the possibility that a regular, everyday vehicle doesn’t have the more robust suspension and steering components that a performance vehicle might have,” says McKague. “If your summer tire has better grip, you can easily create more lateral G-load on a suspension that isn’t designed for that.

“Normally, too, you would have flex in the tire – more bounce through the tire’s own suspension and sidewall movement when it goes over a bump – but a performance tire won’t give you that. So you’re harder on the suspension and you’re harder on the geometry of the steering mechanism. Instead of your car wearing out in eight or nine years, you might be changing parts after four or five years.”

Summer tires also work best when the road heats up and their soft compounds can stick even better to the warm asphalt. When the snow is recently melted and it’s time to remove winter tires, or when the leaves fall and it’s soon time to reinstall those winter tires, your summer tires could be at a disadvantage.

“An all-season tire gives you the ability to drive in that shoulder season when the weather isn’t perfect,” says McKague. “If it’s a vehicle that you need every single day, and you end up with some unfavourable weather, you’ll have more confidence in a tire designed for those cooler conditions.”

For those people who own performance vehicles, however, a performance tire is a no-brainer to make the most of their driving experience. For a start, its wider design probably allows about 20 per cent more rubber to make contact with the road.

Even then, though, the part of the tire that’s actually touching the road is a very small fraction of the entire surface. “That’s why it’s so important to have the right tread pattern design, and the right tread compound,” says Zanzig.

“The average consumer believes tires are just round and black with one rubber, but we actually have 14 or 15 different rubber formulations in a tire and sometimes two types of steel and several fabrics. They’re a highly engineered composite that has to carry the speed and load to make all our consumers safe when they’re driving their vehicles.”

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