This week my wife had a tire fail on her Volvo. We had been running 205-65-14
tires on the stock 5.5x14 steel wheels. They were a huge improvement over the
185-14s the car first came with but they were still not as high performance a
tire as either of us would have liked. She likes the look of the stock steel
wheels with the center caps and trim rings, what can I say, and that limits our
selection of tires. She also drives pretty hard (not your typical Volvo driver)
so we really needed some high performance tires. But we live in Oregon where it
is often raining, so the tires had to work well in the wet too. After a bunch of
research we decided on the Firestone (yes I know, but there's more to that story
than meets the eye...) Firehawk SH30. We wanted a 205-60-14 because of the rim
limitations, and 14" tires in those sizes are not all that common. Most places,
including America's Tire/Discount Tire had almost no selection, and what they
had was crap. In that size the Firehawk was by far the best tire for our
purposes, but it was hard to find. I called around locally and no one could get
me the tire for at least 4-5 days and the best prices I got were high 70s to low
80s. Tirerack had them in stock at $60 and they delivered them by Fed Ex 2 day
air for $28 for all four tires. I had problems with their website but that may
have been because of the security settings on my computer. So I called then
instead and they got me taken care of right away, and the tires arrived at my
door two days later. Anyway, for my money Tirerack did good and I just wanted to
pass that along. :-)
BTW, I'll let folks know what I think of the tires after a few months and some
serious Oregon rain, but from all accounts they are supposed to be great
high-performance all-weather tires. They are even supposed to do fairly well in
the snow. The only thing good I can say about shopping for 14" tires is they
sure are a lot less spendy than the 16" tires I buy for my 280ZXT.
--
Marc Sayer
82 280ZXT
71 510 2.5 Trans Am vintage racer
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