Test Summary | |
Best tyre for dry roads | Continental Sport Contact 5 Michelin Primacy 3 |
Best tyre for wet roads | Continental Sport Contact 5 |
The lowest fuel use | Michelin Primacy 3 |
The most comfortable | Yokohama Advan Sport V105 Toyo Proxes T1 Sport plus |
The quietest tyre | Continental Sport Contact 5 Westlake Sport SA37 Linglong Green Max Toyo Proxes T1 Sport plus Hankook Ventus S1 evo2 Yokohama Advan Sport V105 Falken Azenis FK510 Pirelli P Zero Goodyear Eagle F1 Asymmetric 3 |
There will be some disappointed faces at Goodyear Dunlop, as the aging Continental Sport Contact 5 once again won the test. It beat the second placed Goodyear in the wet largely thanks to exceptional wet braking, it proved to be slightly stronger in the dry, and matched the comfort and noise results. The only area the new Goodyear beat the Continental was rolling resistance, where both the new Goodyear and Dunlop provided extremely impressive rolling resistance scores. The Dunlop almost matched the Goodyear test for test, and the Pirelli P Zero exactly matched the Dunlop to finish joint third.
As disappointed as Goodyear and Dunlop might feel, the results across the top four tests were extremely close and could easily change order in a different test size, or using a different vehicle, there's hope yet that someone will take the challenge to Continental!
Falken will be happy in fourth, with the new Azenis FK510 finishing "best of the rest", beating the well respected Nokian zLine to fifth place, and finishing well ahead of its direct new rival, the Toyo T1 Sport+ which could only manage tenth overall. The Falken looks to be a bit of a performance bargin, as at 300 euros per set, they're one of the cheapest tyres on test.
Amongst the established tyres there was little to report. Bridgestone narrowly beat Michelin, but both companies submitted premium touring tyres which compared to the ultra high performance tyres submitted by the top four brands seems a little curious.
GT Radial was the best of the Chinese brands, but with a set of the new Sport Active now costing 315 euros compared to the Linglong at 220 euros, the extra cost of the tyre struggles to justify the small improvement in performance.
The other point GTU felt it needed to make was the price / performance trade still present when tyre shopping. The test winning Continental were priced at 390 euros per set, and while the Westlake tyres were nearly half the price at 210 euros, they also scored zero points in wet braking and were deemed too dangerous to use on the road.
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