Perhaps not everyone knows that tires are the most critical link in the performance of any car.  Over 10% of your non-editorial content is sold to tire retailers.  In recent issues, there have been single-page "tire reviews," which are nice, but hardly objective.  Why is it that you spend so little time and ink providing readers with the information that they need the most?

It's tough living out here in Middle America, only having a little bit of money to spend on tires every couple of years.  Which tire performs the best?  Which tire provides the best value?  Which tire compromises the least between dry fun and wet safety?  Do any all-season tires actually outperform summer tires yet?  Which tires won't drive me insane with rotation schedules and road noise commuting to work?  Which tire is right for me?  Why should I take the word of this yahoo?  Why can't I have a good set of empirical data and opinions from people I'm at least familiar with if not trust implicitly?

I've given this a lot of thought, and I've come up with a solid (though lengthy) idea for a tire shootout:

The $500 Tire Challenge:

Data would be gathered in at least these objective indicators:

• Lap time on the circuit
  
• 60' time at the strip
  
• 70-0 stop at the strip, with and without ABS
  
• Course time on the wet autocross course
  
• 50-0 stop wet, with and without ABS
  
• Lateral Gs on a 300' or 200' skid pad
  
• Interior noise measured with a dB meter

You'd need to borrow a car or two; for instance a pair of Acura RSX  coupes or Nissan Spec-Vs.  Maybe even better a Progress-tuned RSX or a NISMO R-Tune Spec-V (since they better represent your target readership).  You could just use your own project car tC, but if you have two or even three cars, the testing would go a lot faster.  If you had different cars, you'd want to use one car for all tires in a given bracket to maintain objectivity (e.g. all <200 tires on the Scion, all >200/M+S tires on the RSX).

Why the different tire brackets?  Why test nearly-race tires right along side perfectly sensible summer tires and tires with more sipes than tread blocks?  Well, testing street tires is boring, but only a select few of your readers have a budget for dedicated track/autocross tires.  Fewer still can afford to drive those tires on the street daily.  In my case, my track tire budget was replaced with a snow tire budget.  The UTQG numbers are hardly authoritative about how long a tire will last, how well it brakes in the wet, or if the tire will work well in snow, but it's a handy reference to a tire's intended purpose.  Testing all three brackets would give readers all over the country, with all sorts of bank balances, to select a tire that's right for each of us.

The muse for this shootout was that I had a set of Falken FK-451 GRb tires on my '01 Nissan Sentra SE; hellaciously good tire, but absolutely worthless the day we had a freak blizzard in '03.  It took me 45 minutes to make a 10 mile drive through suburbia.  For this reason, I think it'd be a greatly appreciated gesture to those of us in cold states to test tires that at least have the DOT's nod that they should work in snow.  Since that day, I own a set of snow tires on steel wheels that I swap out any time the weather calls for white fluffy stuff, but I want to at least think that I can get home in an emergency.

The three brackets would encourage manufacturers to recommend if not supply their latest technologies in each bracket.  For example, the Falken RS-615, FK-451 GRb, and Ziex ZE-512 each cost less than the limit, though you wouldn't want to waste time testing the ST-115, because the FK-451 is Falken's best offering in the >200/Summer category.  Likewise, BFG could be represented by the KD, G-Force Sport, and Traction ***  Toyo samples could be Proxes RA-1, Proxes T1-R, and Proxes 4...you get the idea.

To be done right, this test could take a couple of days, but could provide several issues' worth of information with lots of pretty charts, graphs, and scorecards.  Naturally, your writers and editors would indulge themselves (and us readers) with lots of superlative information about turn-in, transitional response, braking feedback, and "communicativeness" at their respective performance envelope limits.  Though nearly impossible to tie objectively, you could retest a given tire at alternate pressure that might give it an edge numerically.

Hey, if you could just get some manufacturers and retail vendors on-board with the idea, I'd come out and marshall the testing.  

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Wow, Nice spelling dude.
Anyway, theres just one thing, I dont think many people use there tuned cars in winter.  

Car and driver ran a tire shootout a couple of months ago. Let me check my back issues and I'll get ya a publication date.  

As nice a post as this is, no one from the magazine looks here. If you really want them to review or deal with tires in the manner in which you've described, I'd suggest you send them a hard copy of what you've written directly.  

Quote:

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Wow, Nice spelling dude.
Anyway, theres just one thing, I dont think many people use there tuned cars in winter.

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Yea, I wasent being sarcastic.
And, isent running a cold engine in high RPMs bad for it?  

Uhh... if you shift sooner you won't hit as high of revs. Or you could let your engine warm up before driving it.