Project Porsche 911: Time for New Tires

Update by David S. Wallens to the Porsche 911 Carrera project car
Dec 11, 2019

How old are the tires on your car? Old enough that they look good but really have seen enough time on this planet to be a hazard? Um, well, maybe?

Yeah, that kinda happened to us. And we should know better. 

While looking for a photo, we came across the images of our Porsche’s then-new tires. Those photos were a decade old. 

How old is too old for tires? And what if they still look good? After all, ours still sported plenty of tread and looked fresh. 

The Tire Rack has two articles about tire aging, and you can read them here and  here.

The short answer? Six to 10 years is the accepted lifespan for a set of tires. So no matter which math you follow, it was time for new tires.

We had a few things guiding our search, too. 

First, sizes: Our car runs a 205/55ZR16 up front and a 225/50ZR16 out back. Tire Rack shows 31 models that cover both sizes, but knocking out the all-season offerings trimmed that number back to 18. 

Since this is an older car, we also wanted something that looked a bit period-correct. The fact we were already looking at just summer tires, we figured, would allow us to be a bit picky since we wouldn’t be sacrificing performance. That trimmed away most of the Extreme Performance 200tw tires. 

But one tire from that mix caught our eye: Yokohama’s Advan A052. It doesn’t have a retro look, and doesn’t even recall the brand’s old A008 tires, but we’d call that model’s look timeless. The testing done by our sister magazine, Grassroots Motorsports, showed that the Advan A052 is a fast tire, too, with the results from this fall’s Tire Rack SCCA Solo Championships confirming that Yokohama had a winner on its hands. 

Our size for the rear of the car wasn’t in stock, while some friends at the company said it might be a bit too extreme for our needs. They recommended that we try their Advan Fleva V701–at least for now. Tire Rack calls it “Yokohama's Ultra High Performance Summer tire developed for enthusiast drivers looking to add some fun to the drive in their sports cars, performance sedans and sporty coupes. The ADVAN Fleva V701 is designed to excel in warm dry and wet conditions, so like all Ultra High Performance Summer tires, it is not intended to be serviced, stored nor driven in near- and below-freezing temperatures, through snow or on ice.”

Okay, fine, let’s order a set. So we did, and they just arrived.

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