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Originally Posted by JoelK
My understanding is that summer tires can perform well in the rain... it just depends on the tire. I have no intentions of putting the tires through slush or snow, but it does get cold at night here.
How much more grip can I expect from a tire like the RE750 vs. the Sumitomo or P7000 tires?
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Summer tires often do not do well in any sort of standing water, and like the Azinis, get very hard in the cold. Since we don't get the same tires/compounds, all the realy good tests the Germans do on tires are useless to us. I'm not sure how unbiased they are, but tirerack.com has some test results on verious tires. All seasons are so popular that a ton of research has gone into them. If you look at the test, you may see that some of the performance all seasons outperform all but the most extreme summer tires in the dry, and clobber them in the wet.
Unless you are driving on the street at 9-10/10ths, or doing some track/autrocross the bigger softer tread blocks on the extreme summer tires just suck up engine power, may make the stearing pull with road changes, not perform as well in the wet, etc.
Debbie has run the RE92s back to back with the HTR+s on the same car so maybe she can comment on relative feel. I put the HTR+s on my A4 after PZero Rosos and found them to be a much better rain tire with very similar dry performance. TireRack also has user reviews, but you must take them with a grain of salt, just like our opinions. Going from a worn out set of X to a new set of Y often make poeple love or hate Y which is usually an unfair comparison. Also, people don't necesarily want to say how crappy a tire they just spent $150 a piece on is.
I just yesterday switched from fairly full tread RE92s to 17" Azenis sports, and the re92s are a much friendlier tire in the cold, and as JC put it, the Azenis are like lego blocks when cold. Even at 35PSI plus cold, they felt flat spotted until I got some heat into them this morning, and it was above frezing, and maybe into the mid 40s by the time I was moving today. I have never had that experince with any all season tires.