Gary I am trying to learn about the tires for our cars and what works best. So stating that my question/comment is "nonsense" is a little much.

Back on point, which Michelin do you currently use and do well in the rain?

 

The comment I meant was nonsense were the ones you summarize as "n-rated tires are not suited for rain" or something to that effect. I didn't see who said it honestly, and I don't have time right now to check back.

I have used Michelin PS2 in everything from light rain to a California winter storm that got down to 35F (Oh, the horror of it!) and soaked us thoroughly. The grip was amazing. Since then, we've had nothing to match that locally, but of course light rain can be worse than standing water because the road isn't washed thoroughly and you're really running on a slurry of dust and oil. The PS2's did fine in those light rains, and so have the Michelin Pilot Super Sports I mounted about six months ago.

We also used Michelin PS2 on an Acura NSX for ten years. That covers a lot of model changes in the tire, but they all performed excellently. I can't speak to the other brands, including the N-rated ones, because we've only used Michelin for the last fifteen years or so and that's forever in tire technology.

Gary

 

Gary, Conti DW has way better traction than PS2 tire in wet. Old PS2 was not great in wet, new PSS is much better but Conti DW is still better.
If one is using tire on a street only Conti DW will work fine as all-around year-long tire.

i will copy here description from link below as i agree to it 100% and i actually have ran on those tires.
http://www.autocross.us/forums/index.php?showtopic=5084

Continental ExtremeContact DW This is the new rain tire to get. It's getting rave reviews as an awesome awesome rain tire. It reportedly gives up significant time in the dry to the other summer tires, so it's more of a specialized rain tire for autocross purposes, but is reasonablypriced (similar to Dunlop and XS) should make a terrific daily driver in wet areas.

I have DW tires on my wifes car and DWS on my lexus. they are way better than anything i had tried before. primary issue with DW tires is that do not take in heat very well so you cannot drive them on track starting in rain and then continue as track dries out - for that you need Z1 star specs, they will not melt. for street DW is a very good choice.

PS2 i had only once and by all means i hated those tires, that was most stupid way I ever spent $1700.

 

I'm back from some chores, so let me clarify a little, Katera. I saw nothing at all wrong with your question. Quite reasonable. And I see nothing wrong with your summary of what others had said either. It was whatever comments you were summarizing that had to be nonsense for someone who hadn't read the entire thread.

I've had time to read the thread now, and most of the comments are exactly what I would have said. But I think these two influenced you unduly: and Michael D's answer:Those aren't really nonsense, but they did give you a false impression. Paul's comment is accurate with regard to the highest performance "summer only" tires on the market. Tires of that sort are very nearly race rubber and have only enough tread to be street legal. That is not what "N-rated" means, although you can buy tires in that category that are N-rated. That is where you were misled by their terminology.

An example of that tire category would be the Michelin Pilot Sport Cup, but no one would recommend that to you unless you planned to track the car very seriously. And even then you would pay a penalty in class rating of your car. They are that close to full race tires and they wear about as fast, which means you'll need a new set every few track days and you'll want to plan to stay home if the dew is heavy. Well, not quite, but their performance on wet surfaces is terrible by our usual standards.

N-rated tires just means the tire model has been developed in cooperation with Porsche and is suitable for use on Porsche sports cars. That implies tolerance of high torque transmission in conditions with good grip; cruising above 150 mph, for as long as traffic may permit, without concern for the tires; and appropriate levels of grip in any weather they're designed for. Cup tires were not designed for Fall, Winter, or even Summer when the water is much deeper than a heavy dew.

I think I disagree with Paul when it comes to tires like the Michelin Pilot Super Sports that are designed to handle rain and moderate cold. I grant they may actually be what he means by "all season" because these terms are slippery. Certainly, they are completely suitable for every season we see in Southern California if you stick to sea level or thereabouts, but they aren't designed for cold weather. Not who should say cold as we knew it in the Midwest. We've driven Pilot Sports here in snow, during a surprise blizzard, but Cindy insisted I drive, and I practically tip-toed home because the compound isn't really suitable for those temperatures.

I can't compare them to the Conti DW specifically because I've never driven on that tire in any car, but for our 997's I can offer a useful observation. When we bought ours, I was concerned about the Porsche reputation from My Day (ca 1975 I'm afraid) and particularly spooked at the width of these tires. In ye olden times, no tire that wide could clear the water fast enough and hydroplaning was inevitable. To find out how bad things would be, I waited for the first Winter storm of the California Desert variety and went to a deserted road. I won't trot out all the technical details but the bottom line is that a 997 with PS2 tires at temps between 35 and 40 has so much residual grip that a non-race-trained driver won't be able to find all of it. That's the borderline, the margin between acceptable and inappropriate because the tire is only rated for use above 40F. But I was seriously hard pressed to find their limits in those conditions on a public road and water clearance was so effective the puddles really had no practical effect whether braking or cornering.

If the Conti DW has more grip than that... well, I'd want to be on a race track to explore the possibility, because I don't go that fast without corner workers and preferably a paramedic nearby.

What is usually meant by "all season" tires won't have anything like the grip of a "three-season maximum-performance" tire, which is how I would describe the Michelin PSS. Even in rain, such tires are specifically designed for high performance cars like ours and the difference is evident in back-to-back track tests. The all-season tires are definitely better in Winter and the months either side for people who live in moderate but 'true' winters where the temps often hover around freezing. They are essential if you just want a relatively cheap tire to hold the car off the ground between summers, when you wear nothing but the highest performance Summer-only tires that must come off before Fall gets rolling.

If I may attempt a summary myself:

• Summer: Some variation of an N-rated ultimate tire like the PS Cup tires if you want the most extreme tires for track use and dry road use. Okay, the occasional rain storm can be tolerated with care, but tip-toe as I did in that blizzard.
• Spring and Fall: A three-season tire like the Michelin Pilot Super Sport. In Summer and on track, these have easily 95% of the grip levels for the Cup and they retain it in the wet and chilly weather of Spring and Fall. I use them all year long and they are so close to Cup levels of performance that driver experience easily overcomes the difference on track. Rather like the 997S up against a GT3 actually.
• Winter: Alpins or something like that. Porsche lists the rating needed in your owner's manual but I never drive at snow altitudes here or in colder states, so I've not memorized it.

For extreme use in Summer or Winter, get the appropriate specialty tire. For anything else, including winters that merely get wet, you want a three-season N-rated tire.

I can't be more specific because I don't know where you live, but in general terms, if the Winter stays above forty most of the time, or if you're willing to leave the Porsche in the garage on colder days, then N-rated 'three'-season tires are fine all year and the Michelin Pilot Super Sports are wonderful tires. If you plan to use the car in real Winter conditions, either because you live in Duluth or because you want to take it to ski resorts in the West, then I'd go for one of the true Winter-rated tires for those few months. Just remember to stay off the autobahn until Spring comes!

Gary

 

I posted the Porsche approved tires a while ago that may be useful for this discussion. Just click on the following:
https://www.6speedonline.com/forums/...10-2011-a.html

 

Honestly, Paul, I never had a lot of entertainment from these debates because my idea of the way to settle them was finding a track. Uh... you gonna be at Willow Springs in the near future? Hangar flying is only useful as a way to kill time waiting for the weather to lift. (Now that I think of it, large parts of the country probably have that situation right now, so we might as well keep talking.)

For the sake of Katera and others following along, I have to make a couple of observations. First, at that site, the only directly relevant comment was "It scored identical to the Michelin PS2 in the dry, and significantly better than the PS2 wet" although he also refers to unidentified reviews that call the DW an awesome awesome rain tire. The MPSS is about like the PS2 in the dry and better in the rain, but even if I had specific data on those two, I can't really deal with "awesome awesome" in any quantifiable way, so that pretty much leaves us with "he likes the DW better."

Second, we used to have a saying in aerospace that "a difference that makes no difference is no difference." In other words, if you can't pick up the difference between two items in field work, they are identical for practical purposes. What I mean in this case is that with race experience and fifty years of road experience I can't push the Michelin Pilot Sport 2 or the Super Sport to their limits on a public road. I could on a race track and the limit was bloody high, but with all my experience I wouldn't try to reach that limit on a public road. Rain or dry. That being the case, any awesome increment of performance for the DW is useless even for me on public roads and it will remain forever untapped for most drivers.

Finally, and most important, that guy is talking about autocross. Now I haven't run an autocross in forty years, at least not with what you'd call intent, so my opinion of modern tires for autocross would be useless. (For the historical record, I can say that the Pirelli Cinturato won hands down over the Dunlops of the day. But only the Smithsonian would care I'm sure.) Nevertheless, a couple of aspects never change and they are worth mentioning for the Porsche newcomers among us.

Autocross is a one and done event. The grip produced by a tire compound rises steadily with temperature until it hits a plateau, a working range of temperatures that produce consistent performance. Not identical across the range, but clustered well enough that we don't have to worry about the temperature being a few degrees different on one tire compared to the other on the same end. This is essentially the same characteristic as the response to slip angle, but fortunately we don't need to get into that.

The important point is that tires produce lower grip until they reach those intended operating temperatures. In a time trial or a proper race, the tires need at least half a dozen laps to come up to temp. That's why you see us doing weird maneuvers during the parade lap. We're trying our best to put heat into the tires. An autocross driver has a different problem. No parade lap. The "out lap" is the only lap you get. That means the most effective autocross tires will be those that heat very rapidly. And when I say rapidly, I mean rapidly because an autocross run typically lasts no more than a minute thirty. Two minutes max, unless they've changed the sport completely.

A useful tire has to be up to competitive grip levels after the first couple of corners. Then of course, you have the obvious problem that a tire that is so responsive to load will heat at the drive wheels significantly just from the start line acceleration. In a rear-wheel-drive car, that means the rears will come up to temp much sooner than the fronts. And that means she'll plow like a John Deere in the first corner unless we do enough braking to bring the fronts up to the operating range also. All part of learning the art of course, but I watched one Jag XK-E written off that way, and a fresh-from-the-dealer's-showroom Morgan Plus Four. Worth remembering if you find really quick-heating tires and think they're optimum for autocross. They may be, but also tricky to exploit.

Rain complicates things further. Two tire models with comparable performance may differ by a few degrees in the low end of the operating range. In other words, one tire begins to provide good performance ten or twenty degrees earlier than the other. Without getting into details, rain slows the warming of all tires, just as we would expect, so even a difference of ten degrees can mean one tire seems to have much better performance than the other, and it does -- for the short duration of an autocross lap.

In fact, one tire may be much better at road work than another that tests better in autocross laps simply because the low end of its temp range can't be reached until near the end of that one short lap. If the event continued to even a second lap, the tire that appears slower might even be the faster of the two models from there on.

My point is not to criticize the DW, Paul. I know nothing about it, as I said in that last note. I do know that autocross always has been a special type of event and it is difficult to extrapolate differences in road performance from autocross performance.

Even road racing -- or the track-day equivalent -- is different enough that we have to use caution in picking a road tire solely from track day results.

All the factors that go into making these differences from autocross to track to road are taken into account by tire designers, and particularly by the designers of high performance cars. I bought my Michelin PSS tires before the model had completed certification by Porsche, but I did that knowing pretty much what factors had to be considered, and also knowing that Lamborghini already had begun using the tire on their cars.

Overall, I feel very uncomfortable recommending a tire for road use on a Porsche that hasn't at least been submitted for the N-rating. Absent the testing that entails, we have only the data of limited use that we get from autocross experience and informal reports from track days. Unless someone really plans to limit the car's use to those events and tired runs home at night, I really think they are better off having a tire model that has been designed and exhaustively tested for our cars.

Gary

 

I've had the Hankook Ventus on for 6 months (maybe 7,000 miles or so) and they've been pretty good. Thee are a bunch of other threads here on those tires. The talk have quietd down a bit since the Pilot SS came out, but they are still a good, low-priced option.

I wouldn't ever say they're as good as PS2s, but I think they're good enough, and I decide to bank the savings and spend it on other mods. To each their own, and this is how I decided to allocate my funds...

When it's time to replace these, I'll look at the PSSs, these again, and other inexpensive options, going with the same plan on mods.

 

Thanks for the detailed response Gary, I learned a lot from reading this thread.

I live in Houston, TX. Well just outside of it.

We have two seasons here. Hot and Humid, and FREAKING Hot Humid and Raining. That's pretty much it. We get 50 inches of rain a year with a lot of it being Torrential rain forest type downpours. Now I do NOT plan on driving my car in that stuff, but inevitably it will happen that a cloud burst gets me on the way home from work. This is why I need a tire that can handle rain and not send me into the ditch. I did drive around my neighborhood the other day during a light drizzle just to get a feel for the car in wet conditions and it did fine. I don't know if that was my tires or the fact that it's a C4S and my all wheel drive was kicking in.
Currently I have Bridgestone Potenza's on that came with the car, they have right at 6k miles on them and still look pretty good. I will prob replace my tires at 10k just to get new rubber on and I didn't want to make a $2000 mistake by putting something on that would drive terrible or worse be unsafe in the rain.

-I don't and won't track
-My car is a semi-daily driver but I only live 3 miles from work
-I plan on only putting around 3-4k a year on her.


Thanks again for the thoughtful and insightful responses.

 

Wow . . I've never seen such wordy postings. Gary you should become a political speech writer.

Go w/ Michelin Pilot Super Sports!!!!!

 

Today I just replaced the PZeros with new Michelins PS2 all the way around on my 06 911 Carrera S cabrio, out the door for $1500 bucks (I did some dealing). I've had Michelins PS2's on other cars and I believe they are a great tire for the $$.

 

Well, let me tell you how it is. You know that commercial for some motorcycle brand that shows people doing mundane things while wearing helmet and leathers? It's January, I can't play golf because it's blowing 35 knots outside, and no DE event is scheduled until March:

"I want to ride!" Uh... drive.

Failing that, might as well talk about.

Gary

 

Gotcha. We had a couple of assignments in Texas. Very seriously considered retiring there, so I know the climate you mean. I seriously doubt your C4S was relying on the AWD unless your road driving is insanely fast. That Winter storm I tested in was a Texas style soaker, though less total precip, and our C2S was comfortable and so stable at high g-loads that I was almost ready to believe the insurance policy's report that it really was a C4S. (It is not.)

Unless you really need to save a couple of hundred when the time comes, your type of driving is perfect for using a three-season tire like the Michelin Pilot Super Sports year round. When those Bridgestones get near the wear bars, I'd recommend putting on a set of MPSS, adjust them to 34/37 and enjoy your car. Your car and those tires will be a perfect match for any Gulf weather. (Well, a bra might be favored by meticulous souls when tropical storms pass...)

Gary

 

Agree! I have the Michelin Pilot Super Sports and I am here to tell you they are better and cheaper than the regular PS2's.

I think that Michelin was tired of everybody bolting to Hankook and came up with an alternative that is about $400 cheaper than the PS2's and only about $350 more than the Hankook's.

I paid about $1375 for my set of 19's and I will never switch again. They are the perfect tire for this car.

Not sure why anyone would by the PS2 over the Super Sport either...

My two cents-

 

^ For what it's worth, I agree with Gary 100%

 

I'm on my 2nd set of MPSS (wore the first prematurely at an open track day). Previously had P-Zeros. MPSS has wet outboards on both sides. I've found it to be very strong in rain and plush under regular driving, though I have 4WD so it takes a jerky hand on anything short of ice to lose grip.

Still, first time I took them out I was grinning for 3 hrs straight.
if I had to choose between giving back any of my mods or the MPSS, I'd sooner take off everything else than these tires.

One more thought: We can probably all agree that the Contis , MPSS, Potenzas etc. are all more than adequate in the rain if you're not pushing the car hard. But why are we so focused on rain performance? I get that it rains sometimes, and it would be different if we were talking about Seattle or something, but I take it none of us are going to go canyon carving or ripping through backroads when its raining anyway so to me you buy the tire that performs best for the times you will actually put the hammer down.