i am looking to replace my pos potenzas here in the next month. the guy at the tire shop i took one of my tires to get a punture repaired suggested master craft avenger zhp tires. they are made by cooper, which i think makes good tires, but am unable to find any reviews anywhere on the net. guy said a lot of racers run these tires, they are all season tires and the price he quoted me wasnt bad, 169 per tire installed. anybody have any feedback?

 

mmmm, Not sure, mastercraft sorta makes me worry, but thats probably because its not a name like TOYO.

IMO, if you want some really sticky UHP summers, go with some Toyo Proxes T1-R, or some NITTO 555 Extremes

Both great tires, and who knows, the Mastercrafts may be ok..... But I trust toyo

 

And you think the Potenzas are bad???

Coopers are crap tires. I would not let any person I cared about drive on Coopers. When my father bought a second hand car where the dealer had fitted new Coopers, I made them take them off and fit real tires. The Potenzas will be 10 times better than any Cooper.

Having said that about Cooper - would I consider using Cooper's discount brand??? Never in a million years.

What do you want from the tires? Long life, all-season to handle cooler weather (don't fool yourself that you can use them instead of winter tires, all-season tires may be better than summer tires in snow, but they're still marginal)? Performance?

For what it's worth, I bought a sports car, and would fit performance tires, not economy tires - save those for the Camry. You might have different priorities.

Go to Tire Rack, pick the RX-8, view the max performance summer, ultra-high-performance summer, or ultra-high-performance all-season categories - and pick a tire from that resulting list. Besides brands offered by Tire Rack, I'd also suggest considering the Toyo T1-R (NOT any other Toyo models).

Regards,
Gordon

Edit - just saw Bindon's post. No offense, but Nitto's are almost as crappy as Coopers. If you want a performance tire, do NOT go with Nitto! Yeah, they've got high visibility with the "sport compact" (ie modded Civic) crowd, but then along with their tire choices I'd also be questioning most of the suspension mods those guys make anyway!

 

Hey Gordon, don't hold back, tell us what you really think!

FWIW, I was considering some Coopers for my wife's car as a winter tire. After reading some reviews I found on it, I wouldn't trust them, and I was glad to shell out the extra $$$ for Michelins.

 

go check out Car and Drivers recent tire test results:

http://www.caranddriver.com/article....ticle_id=10252

Other good sources for reviews are Tire Rack and Consumer Reports.

 

thanks for the feedback. thats all i wanted to know. whats with the other toyo tires?

 

Racers don't use All-Season tires. They use summer performance tires. Run away from this dealers advice. If you must use them because of location or price, read reviews first. Grassroots Motorsports also ran a test of tires.