'If you want to see a motoring journalist in excruciating pain, watch them pay for a set of tyres'
Nothing beats the feeling of fresh tyres, reckons Richard Meaden – even when he has to pay for them himself...
If you should ever feel the urge to see a motoring journalist in excruciating pain, watch them pay for a set of tyres. I know, I know. Aside from the irony of my profession’s fine tradition of ritualised tyre abuse, there’s the fact that we spend our time extolling the virtues of fine-handling cars. All of which depend upon those four vital points of contact as the primary link in the dynamic chain.
It’s not that we’re tight. OK, we are tight. Or more likely skint, as sadly not all of us are trustafarian YouTubers. Besides, a lifetime of literally smoking around in other people’s cars until the tyres delaminate (ideally captured in gratuitous 800fps slo-mo) can change a man. I mean, doesn’t everyone have a friendly bloke who arrives in a van loaded with umpteen sets of pre‑mounted wheels and tyres and happily swaps them for tattered carcasses?
This week has been painful, because I had to replace the tyres on my Fiesta ST200. The car having only done 18,000 miles since new, it was still on its original-fit Bridgestone Potenzas, which had unsurprisingly turned to stone and sported a shadowy tread pattern that made the Shroud of Turin look like Ultra HD.
The once pimpin’ 17-inch rims and 205/65 tyres are now deemed relatively modest, which means the choice of direct high-performance replacements is limited, at least in the correct 84W load rating. It’s a curse for the modern-classic owner, but in the end – and after a Herculean but ultimately fruitless effort to blag anything in the correct size – I bit the bullet and bought a set of Michelin Pilot Sport 5.
They’re a Y load rating, so a little stiffer in the sidewall, but the overall effect has been transformational, especially in the wet. They also happen to look fabulous. Though if I ask Mrs M what she thinks of the micro-textured Premium Touch Sidewall Design, I suspect she’ll divorce me. Or section me (205, naturally).
What can I say? New tyres have a weird effect on me. For the first few days you get to enjoy the pungent box-fresh tang. The rubber looks inky black; the pristine treadblocks, sharp sipes and immaculate sidewalls perfect in every detail. It’s like being a kid and constantly staring down at your new pair of shoes.
And then there’s the plush feeling you get as you drive away from the fitting bay. I’m sure some of it is psychological. But just as your car always feels that little bit better when you’ve cleaned it inside and out (in the case of Mrs M’s car, removing 100kg of horse feed from the back seat, plus three bagfuls of empty Evian bottles, spent sleeves of those fancy Waitrose Serrano & Iberico pocket meats and umpteen crumpled Wine Gums packets scooped from the passenger footwell) new tyres just feel gooooood.
It’s one of the reasons I always look forward to reading my learned colleague John ‘Treadshuffle’ Barker’s findings in evo’s annual Tyre Test. I envy him that gig because tyre testing is one of the funnest, weirdest and most cerebral driving exercises of all.
It’s a strange and fanatical process. Same car, same tyre spec, same road routes and track tests. Same drivers and same procedures. Initially you find yourself a bit lost, the detail you’re trying to distinguish lost in a fog of overthinking. But as you relax and dial yourself in, you become far more sensitive than you could ever imagine, to the point where each tyre feels as different as can be. It’s a genuinely fascinating process.
To avoid any bias, all testing is done blind. Not literally – we’re good, but not that good – but because we’re weirdos and would identify a tyre simply by its tread, we have to learn to walk up to the car and get in without glancing at the wheels. It’s harder than you think; a bit like maintaining eye contact when there are other ‘things’ you’d rather gawp at. At least so I’m told. Ahem.
We’re all tyre nerds at heart. If you love cars it goes with the territory. As a kid I was obsessed with the Pirelli P7. The blocky herringbone tread just looked so mesmerising, and it was always fitted to the coolest cars. Similarly, the Michelin TRX – famously and rather awkwardly only available in metric sizes – had those strange, serrated V-shaped tread blocks. To this day whenever I think of a TRX I immediately picture a BMW M635 CSi.
I cut my teeth on hot Minis and always lusted after a set of Yokohama A008s, purely because they had the wildest asymmetric tread pattern with a semi-slick shoulder rib peppered with small circular indents. I never got any because I went with mighty 12-inch rims instead of 10-inch cotton reels, the extra diameter needed to clear my lovely Mini Sport billet four-pot calipers.
It’s something I regret to this day. But if nothing else the yearning for a set of those super-duper Yokos gives me the perfect justification to someday revisit classic Mini ownership. New tyres and Man Maths®. It doesn’t get better than that.
