Grip-less, Noisy Tires Are Fun

Thursday night on the way home my left-front decided to have the sidewall separate from the tread.  Thankfully I was close to home and not traveling fast so I didn't suffer a catastrophic failure.  However, tires were not an expense I was planning on so I couldn't go with the tires that I normally buy and wanted something with better life but also cheaper.  Firestone had their "Wide Oval AS" performance all-season tires on sale so I went with those.  This is the first time in about 5 years that I've put anything but high performance summer tires on my car but I don't do any racing around anymore and need to get more than 30,000 miles out of my tires.

They got installed yesterday so I took them out to find out how much grip I had to give up.  My old Potenzas had a lot of grip and they were completely silent unless you pushed them completely past the limit.  I pushed these things into a corner and they just started howling like crazy.  I laughed.  Yes, I had basically no grip compared to my old tires but it was still better than the Michelin pats of butter that the Mazda came from the factory with.  After playing with them for a while, I determined that they were good enough.  The most fun comes from the 1-2 shift.  I'm used to losing traction into second, but normally it happens with little fanfare.  I feel the tires slip and sometimes the traction control light flashes.  Now the 1-2 shift is accompanied by a loud bark or screetch.  It makes me LOL.  Fuel economy will be going down.

So the moral of the story is that a lack of grip can be more fun, but it isn't fun for the reason that the Toyboys think it is.  Lack of grip is fun because it is more obnoxious.  Instead of quietly ripping through curves up in the hills, the tires howl and screetch so it sounds like you're working the car much harder.  Instead of a quiet slip of the tires into the next gear, they bark and make you feel that much better.  But make no mistake, you will be SLOWER!  I cannot hold curves like I used to.  I had so much throttle-off oversteer yesterday that I thought I was going to have to take the tires back to get new ones because I scrubbed most of the rears away.  That lack of control was fun.  It was the same when I had my old Mustang.  Stabbing the throttle and having the rear hanging out was useless but fun.

Leave it to the time when you have like zero dollars left for your tires to break though.  Ugh.