 again and welcome to another episode of Cobb U. Tires. There's a lot of factors that go into choosing the right one. So today's episode, we're going to focus on some information that's going to help you make a well-informed decision on choosing the only four things on your car that come in contact with the pavement. Well, we hope so anyways. Upgrading your tires, whether it's a brand spanking new car or it's been around the block a couple of thousand times is one of the best dollar for dollar modifications that you can make. Now, regardless of how you use it, you're going to benefit from a carefully selected set of tires. Even if your budget doesn't allow for those lightweight aftermarket alloy wheels, you're going to be light years ahead just by putting better rubber on your stock wheels. And let's take a look at why that is. Many cars come equipped with all season rated tires. Now, cars that live in hot weather can get away with summer performance tires year round, but since manufacturers sell to people all over the world in different climates, they need a one size fits all or Goldilocks approach to performance. Now, this is also going to save them a lot of money in the long run because they're buying hundreds and thousands of the exact same tire. Now, as a result of them trying to keep this cost down, your performance car probably started its life in the factory with tires that would have been more suited for a rental car. And at this point, anything's better than what you have. But if on road performance is what you're after, you're going to want to go with a stock or close to stock size tire with an aggressive tread pattern, sticky rubber compound, and a speed rating that exceeds your expected top speed. A sticky rubber compound is going to give you additional grip. Now, if you decide to go with a wider tire with more surface area, that can improve your performance even more. Now, what kind of tire options should you consider? Here we have a few different styles of tires. Each one is tailored specifically for their retrospective needs. We have an all season tire, which is what most cars come equipped from the factory with, a performance oriented street tire, a drag radial, and a dedicated track day competition slick. Starting with the all season, we can see that we've got some pretty serious conservative tread here. And what ends up happening is that we sacrifice performance and grip in dry conditions in the name of maximum life, mileage, comfort, and wet traction. Now, as we mentioned earlier, most cars will have tires similar to these fitted from the factory, so there's plenty of room for improvement. Moving on to our performance oriented street tire, one of the first things you'll notice is a much more aggressive tread pattern that strikes a balance between a normal street tire and a track day special. The added performance and grip comes at a cost, however, which is usually a shorter lifespan and lack of grip and cold weather followed by questions from your significant other concerning the lack of money in your checking account. A drag radial, as the name might suggest, lives its life a quarter mile at a time. It also has some limited tread to meet DOT standards, and you'll get all this rubber making contact with the pavement, so you'll be able to hook up at the start line and stay in the groove all the way to the finish. Again, with the increase in performance comes a much more drastic trade off in drivability and tread life. While there is little tread on these, it's not going to be enough to keep you from aquaplaning if the heavens decide to open up and rain tears of joy all over the road. So if you're going to run these on the regular, keep that in mind. And last, but certainly not least, we have the track only slick. It's easy to see where the name comes from for the absolute limit of performance. These tires are very soft and don't last very long and are like driving on ice in the slightest of drizzles. Now these are going to be your track only tires, so if you want to run these on your daily driver, you want to get to the track first and then swap on the super sticky goodness. Now that we've covered the why and the what of upgrading our tires, let's look at how we go about choosing the right tire for our needs. First things first, we need to know what size of tire we're looking for. If you look on the sidewall of the tire, you should see the tire size designation. It will look like a string of random numbers and letters thrown together. Your tire size will usually be expressed as the width of the tire in millimeters, followed by a slash, followed by sidewall aspect ratio, which indicates the relationship between sidewall height and tire width as a percentage, a letter indicating the internal construction of the tire, followed by the diameter of the wheel in inches. In this case, we have a 295 45 r 17. That means it's with measures 295 millimeters. It has a sidewall height equal to 45% of the tires with it is a radial tire and it's internal diameter measures 17 inches. That wasn't so hard, was it? Now if you're going to stick with your stock wheels, you're going to want to go with the stock size tire or something slightly wider. You've got to be careful because in this case, there really is too much of a good thing. If you go with a wheel that's too wide, you're going to run the risk of rubbing against the suspension components in your wheel well or you might not clear the outer lip of your fender. Aside from clearance issues, it can also negatively impact handling from too much grip or on the other end, if the tires too narrow, you can have not enough grip. Ideally, we'd like to find that nice sweet spot balance of slip and grip. If you want to learn more about tire sizing and maintenance topics, you can visit the extra credit below. That's going to do it for this episode. Thanks for joining us and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you can check out future episodes. I'm Emmy, your host for CobbU. Remember, check out Cobbtuning.com for all your parts and tuning needs. Do you like the storage solutions featured in our studio? Then visit sonictoolsusa.com to get more detailed product information.