Tire Test Results

Tires Tested

• What We Liked: The steering is extremely responsive.
• What We’d Improve: The overall traction has room to grow.
• Conclusion: It’s a capable tire that has a niche that will love it.

• What We Liked: It’s comfortable, well-balanced, easy to handle and quick.
• What We’d Improve: There’s some room to improve the on-center feel.
• Conclusion: A worthy successor that only improves on its legacy.

• What We Liked: A rounded, athletic tire with few weaknesses.
• What We’d Improve: It could be a little quieter on coarse surfaces.
• Conclusion: An enduring pillar of the category that remains strong in almost every respect.

What We Learned on the Road

Our 6.0-mile loop of expressway, state highway and county roads provides a great variety of road conditions that include city and highway speeds, smooth and coarse concrete, as well as new and patched asphalt. This route allows our team to experience noise comfort, ride quality and everyday handling, just as you would during your drive to school or work.

Our road ride route revealed the refinement of the ExtremeContact Sport 02. It felt effortlessly composed over bumps large and small, cushioning and isolating its occupants from the imperfections of the road. This extended into its noise performance as well, managing a quiet ride that deserves note even beyond the limited scope of the test and category. Steering felt natural, if less responsive than we expected. The small dead spot on-center should have felt sportier than it did, as it took an additional notch on either side before it really came alive. The Pilot Sport 4S was a touch firmer in ride quality, although it did a good job soaking up and isolating imperfections. Noise remained similarly reasonable, with some mild grinding resonance over concrete, but was primarily on the quieter range of the test. Steering was intuitive and natural with appropriate feedback and progressive resistance into a turn and was easily one of its standout traits on the road. The Potenza Sport made an interesting case for itself, and most certainly leaned the hardest into the "Sport" part of its moniker. Nearly every part of the experience could be described as taut or alert, from the ride to the steering, and inevitably that focus cut both ways. Nearly every surface of the road could be felt, and impacts were quick, firm, and well-damped. Handling was immediate, responsive, and firm on-center, but the lack of effort building into turns may turn off some drivers. Noise, while it was well-mixed and not especially worse in the type of pattern sound compared to the others, was flatly just louder than the other tested tires.

What We Learned on the Test Track

Our 1/3-mile per lap test track course includes 90-degree street corners, a five-cone slalom and simulated expressway ramps. Run in both dry and wet conditions, the test track allows our team to experience the traction, responsiveness, handling, and drivability normally only encountered during abrupt emergency avoidance maneuvers or competition events.

First of the pack, the Pilot Sport 4S was capable around the track, provided you minded its limits. The penalty for pushing beyond was typically stubborn understeer, and it wasn’t particularly quick to recover. Risk and reward go hand-in-hand however, and it remained a particularly fast performer in the wet, edging out the other tires for the best average lap times if you could avoid stepping outside the lines. The organic steering was fair, but just a hair under the alertness our testers preferred. The ExtremeContact Sport 02 let loose around our track with stable acceleration and respectable braking power, but its true strength came in lateral traction. It felt planted in a way that let our drivers really scramble around corners without the considerations of a more delicate tire and powering throttle out of corners with not-quite reckless abandon. Steering could have been slightly more urgent, but still felt good. The Potenza Sport again occupied an interesting position in the wet, with aggressive steering that was arguably the most severe to contend with, owing to its lower overall traction. Its more direct responsiveness necessitated several micro-inputs to keep it in line, favoring a very digital "all-or-nothing" input versus a more gradual analog progression. It could feel great at the edge thanks to quick recovery from limit-breaking maneuvers, but the less intuitive steering also made it difficult to put together a perfect lap matching the tire’s potential.

Stopping from 50-0 mph put all three tires within exceptionally close proximity to one another, with no more than 3 feet separating the Potenza Sport (at 88 feet) from the ExtremeContact Sport 02 (at 85 feet), and the Pilot Sport 4S (at 86 feet) finishing neatly between the two.

Once the track dried off, our drivers again took the ExtremeContact Sport 02 for a spin, roaming athletically from turn-to-turn, thanks to its natural steering and response, making for an easy tire to "sync up" with. The steering retained some of its minute delay from the wet and road driving, and the dry track laps revealed it could be a bit more accurate. However, it also boasted the fastest times around the track, through the slalom, and again, the shortest braking from 50-0 mph, so the performance chops were there, loudly and proudly. The Pilot Sport 4S contrasted this nicely, only a hair’s breadth away from the Continental, with marginally slower average lap times and only a fraction of a foot further in braking distance. A bit more accuracy in the steering department worked to its favor here as well, traded for slightly less responsiveness and a tendency toward understeer. The Potenza Sport’s steering, again, shone for its rapid, responsive control but required a delicate touch to manage. Traction was comparatively lower and in the dry, the immediacy of input could feel like connect-the-dots during a lap rather than a smooth transition between actions. Despite objective braking from 50-0 mph taking a couple of feet further than the other two tires, the Potenza Sport still finished with average lap times no more than 2/10th of a second behind the leading tire.

Summary

We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: the Max Performance Summer Tire category is fiercely competitive. It’s not uncommon to see wide swaths of differences between entrants in other tire categories: braking distances 20 feet apart, lap times several seconds from one another, wildly divisive driving characteristics, all are common sights.

At this level of production, those gaps narrow to slivers. This is a game of inches and heartbeats, where only a single tick separates the great from the best. Even here, with professional drivers and several repeated tests, the differences between tires may narrow down to personal preference, with an individual’s driving style simply preferring one of these tires to the other without being "wrong" for doing so. The Continental ExtremeContact Sport 02 certainly makes a great case for itself here, as a well-rounded approachable tire with a natural steering progression and predictable behavior. It helps that it cleans up nicely and can switch from a wild ride to a refined, even comfortable, drive afterward. Michelin’s Pilot Sport 4S is considered by many to be the benchmark of the category for great reason. It has a venerable history of dominating in the wet and dry, and while there’s perhaps room to improve some on-road refinement, it will long be present during any discussion as to who sits at the top of Max Performance Summer. Finally, the Potenza Sport makes perhaps the greatest argument for personal preference in this test - its direct steering characteristics are divisive, but the fine line between love and hate is exactly that. There’s objectively room to improve traction and balance that could further take performance to the next level, but its undoubtedly sporty feeling and sharp responsiveness position it well to be someone’s new favorite tire.