RenaeTires are tires, not gear, right? Wrong. You may have a nice ride, loaded with goodies and posh to the nines, but none of that will mean stink if you blow your car into the weeds thinking you can apex a fast turn without grip and handling. And where do you think that comes from, your strength of will? Think again. Ride comfort and handling in all conditions counts, too. But you don’t have the kind of coin to change out tire sets as the seasons change. But an all-season tire can be a lot like wearing wing tips to every occasion. They end up not doing anything particularly well. Not so with the BFGoodrich g-Force Super Sport A/S tires we recently tested. We threw them through the wringer in the wet and the dry, on pavement and rough patch, and it came back at us wanting more. Check out thorough review and photos after the break.
Tires tend to fall within one of two camps for most (not all) men. Camp #1: They’re just something you have to spend money on every few years because you were told that once your tires no longer permit President Lincoln’s head to drop all the way into the tread, you’ve got to plunk down for a set; or Camp #2: They’re part of the automotive aesthetic, where you’ve dropped a cool couple of grand on your wheels and you need a set of low profile tires to show them off. Well, to the cognoscenti, tires are what make your car handle and ride as well and as safely as possible, depending on what conditions your tires were designed for (summer, all-season, snow & ice). Gear Patrol plans on providing a primer for the uninitiated sometime in the not-too-distant future. For now, let’s get you ready for an all-around performer for all four seasons, just in case you’ve got a set of nearly bald ones on your precious ride.
Introduced as an Ultra High Performance All-Season tire, the g-Force Super Sport A/S are specifically designed for more sporting vehicles, though your average family sedan would do good by a set of these. One of the most difficult achievements in the tire industry is to create a tire with solid performance in both wet and dry conditions and good road feel with the more cushy aspects like ride comfort and treadwear. The g-Force Super Sport’s boast Multi Grip Tread Technology, essentially merging three different tread compounds across the tire to provide traction in wet, dry and wintry conditions. We ran through these tires on a BMW 3-Series with the Sport Package setup.
Handling in dry conditions was excellent, providing great on-center feel and well above average handling. This author had trouble distinguishing its dry handling characteristics from a dedicated summer performance tire. Not too shabby for all season rubber, we might add. Accelerating hard after a curve on freeway entrance ramps proved exhilarating and confidence inspiring. Furthermore, high speeds were easily achieved with aplomb due to the stability and great on-center feel. The ride feel itself, although firm, was by no means jarring or uncomfortable, even on lunar landscape-like Chicago pavement. Even in the low-profile setup of our test car, the sidewalls proved strong and supportive, thanks to the g-Control sidewall inserts.
Wet handling was good, as we took freeways and twisties in heavy precipitation without sacrificing much. We would’ve loved to toss it around a wet track without any traffic around to really test the Super Sport’s limits in the wet, but it was not to be. Nevertheless, the wet performance was quite respectable but not astounding. We’ll have to wait a couple of months to see how the Multi-Grip Tread Technology fares in Chicago winters, but we imagine that it will do quite well, short of 8 inch snow drifts and anything resembling a blizzard.
