winter sneakers

00ls-sport

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what do you guys use? i have run 4 snows on my tbird for years, with great success. i had aggressive snows in the rear, and less aggressive snows in the front. now i have the ls. i just bought these on ebay today, and trying to get a feel for a good set of snows. i know i will be using 215-60-16's. thanks.
 
I've run a set of Dunlop Graspic DS1s. These need to be replaced and I am considering several options.

First I use the car mostly to get to/from ski slopes in Vermont. Last part of the drive is over a pass where they do not plow after ~9pm so if its snowing I'm going up and over an unplowed road. The Graspics have performed great. The Blizzacks WS50 are also well regarded. Both of these are more snow than performance oriented (noisey, sloppy handling in the dry, etc.) Being cheap I'm considering either Cooper Weathermaster (noisier yet) or Winterforce (by Firestone/Bridgestone marketed by Dayton). I've had good luck with snow travel with the Coopers on my old Merkur and the Winterforce are an old style snow tire (aggressive tread) with modern materials (soft low temperature friendly rubber) but they would likely be very noisy and give up even more dry/wet handling.

Thats the trade-off as I see it. How bad do you want to go in the snow vs how much dry/wet performance are you willing to give up.

If you want better snow performace with less sacrafice in non-snow driving look at the Dunlop Winter Sport M3, Michelin Alpin, or one of the other Blizzaks (LM22 I believe).

IMHO one down side to the Blizzaks and the Dunlops is the use of soft winter rubber for the first 1/2 of the tread and harder all-season rubber underneath. So that after 2 or 3 winters the tire is now an all season tire. While I'm willing to sacrafice non-snow performance in the winter I'm not willing to sacrafice it in the spring, summer and fall. So after using the winter rubber I need to either throw the tires out or use them in the off-season and be unhappy with the cars performance.

This is one reason I'm considering a less engineered snow tire. I'd rather use the tire up in 3 or possibly 4 seasons and use summer only rubber during the spring, summer and fall.
 
Why not take a look at the Pirelli WInter Carving tires? Badass snow tires that are studdable for some real grip on the ice.
 

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