I wouldn't complain about 22k. When in Melb I was on 10k front-to-back - swapping the new pair into the front and dumping the old rears for the old fronts. The short story is that long life and good traction are contrary to each other. Soft compounds grab better (adhesion from increased contact-patch surface area, result of the compound's surface conformance), but by their very nature they wear faster. The best you can do is compromise. Tread patterns (not the block sizes but the patterns) generally define the road noise and the water-dispersal of the tyre. The lips just before the mounting bead on some of the Dunlops are good if the missus drives the car sometimes. Usually silica is 'better' than normal C-base rubber. -Silica compounds always outperform conventional carbon-black based compounds in wet braking and handling. -They grip a *lot* better when cold than C-base compounds. -At equal wear resistance, silica grips better. This brings long life and good traction closer together. -C-base compounds tend to 'squeal' more. Silica generally makes a scraping or scratching sound. Great for driving hard without screeching and attracting unwanted attention. -Silica tyres are CRAP for burnouts. [but why buy a sticky, grippy tyre only to try and break traction?! ] They just shed crumbly dry rubber powder and don't melt - they don't leave very impressive marks. Under controlled conditions, naturally. You can check the compound type by burning a bit of the tyre with a lighter. A C-black tyre will go all gooey and sticky pretty quickly. A silica tyre will more dry-char and crumble. If your driving habits are sedate then this will be of little interest to you...this all assumes you drive your vehicle beyond 7/10th's regularly. Needless to say this requires you to maintain your vehicle's safety meticulously. (Some people let other people change their brake pads. Would *you* trust the pimply faced apprentice to recognize a fatigued caliper bolt a good stomp away from shearing? Don't laugh, caliper bolts DO shear. Not to mention the squealing brakes because they didn't understand what that orange sticky stuff is for. Or that they forgot to lube the slide pins.) Sorry, been a long day. When you start to push your rubber it often pays not to muck about rotating corner to corner (obviously unidirectionals will only rotate on the same side without flipping on the rim). Normally if you drive solidly your rears will tend to go first. Keep your best tyres on the front. This is for a number of reasons *Braking - obviously inertial weight transfer puts the front rubber 'under the pump'. Especially in marginal conditions (rain, loose surface) your front end is the end that lets you steer away from danger. With ABS, front grip in emergency braking can mean the difference between stopping safely on the gravel shoulder or ending up in a 100km/h head-on. *Understeer resistance - It's easy to recover from oversteer, but understeer is the effect part of cause-and-effect. This means with better shoes up front, you can push harder, deeper into corners, and lay down the power earlier on the way out without suffering push-plow. *Cornering/banking grip - the sensitive parts on the front pair are the shoulders. It's safer to hit banking turns hard when you have plenty of meaty compliant tread blocks (not too big+soft though as on cheapies) on the outside corner (being pushed onto them by centrifugal force on the vehicle). A mid-life tyre from the rear won't offer the same tenacious grab on the shoulders as a young performance tyre. Once the front lets go, you are stuffed. Rear slip can be modulated with throttle and controlled with countersteer. Anyway without writing a Mills 'N' Boon, that is what I have to offer. Some of the above is theory, in an attempt to understand the 'why is it so', but all of it is derived from my experience. I also like to run lower pressures, perhaps 32 depending on the weather. This chews out the tread quicker but reduces traction loss in the wet and helps fight understeer. Once day the late (and great) Howard Marsden made a comment on some track work they did, trying different pad and tyre combinations. He reckoned the grip got better the closer to 45 they got. I heard this at an XR club meet I was late for. I was a clever dick at 20 then, and having missed the introduction I piped up and said "That's not what I found! What sort of testing were you doing?" My mate tapped me on the shoulder and whispered "That's Howard Marsden..." Well I was gobsmacked - I had never seen Howard's face before, only heard the name. I think he was helping develop the AU XR6/8 then So with apologies for the sheer size of the post.. take it all with a grain of salt but I reckon go with a silica compound; watch the top-of-the-range tyres some have a lower tread depth for performance reasons; a rim protection bead if poss.; low pressures for heavy/wet work; DO NOT LET THEM USE CLAMP-IN BALANCE WEIGHTS (the tyre rotates on the rim sometimes under heavy braking.. this drags the weight and scratches the lip of the rim); not too wide as the steering geometry was designed with a limited range of shoe-sizes in mind. And Pirelli's are more reputation than substance - that's the tyre review consensus. I wasn't impressed with them in a Lotus Elise and an S2000 but that's was just seat of the pants, not an A-B comparo. And I had four Falken's for two days. I sold them back to the dealer at a loss of $200 they were that bad. The Dunlop FM901 was the best tyre I ever used, but was discontinued a while ago in the smaller diameters. The SP 3000A wasn't too bad though for a well-priced tyre. I have not used the DZ series of Dunlops, which are a street-legal race tyre. I nearly did but at the time sticker-shock stopped me. Talk to the guys at Stuckeys, http://www.stuckey.com.au/. They know their stuff pretty damn well. regards
