Just wondering if you have a brand preference these days, personally I like Uniroyal and have them fitted to almost every car I have owned
That's quite a difficult one Jock because different people have different priorities and different cars with different suspension being driven by people with a wide variety of driving styles can mean that one person's favourite tyre is not necessarily another's. So I can only give you my personal "take" on it.
The "safe" recommendation has to be to buy one of the really big names, which I would rate as one fitted as OE by the various manufacturers. So, Bridgestone (although I have not liked the Eco things fitted to my Ibiza) Dunlop, Michelin, Goodyear, Pirelli, Continental - I could go on. The problem with going this route is you can relieve yourself of quite large amounts of cash and, being a true Scot, that goes against my nature. Also, as you've discovered with your Dunlops, which I have to say I generally like but do find they tend to wear quite quickly, sometimes you just run into a tyre, which in a particular application, just doesn't work for you.
Personally I go for a name known to me in the mid range. So, Firestone, Uniroyal, (Uniroyal have always had a good reputation for wet weather grip) Avon, Barum, Yokohama, Falken and so on. Many years ago when we were in Czechoslovakia for a round of the European Touring cars at Brno, we tyre engineers from the competing tyre companys So Firestone, Dunlop, Goodyear, were treated to a tour of the Barum factory. This was back in the '70s, long before Continental owned them, and we were all impressed at how modern a facility it was. I've run a number of my cars on Barums and been very happy with them. In fact the panda has 2 on her rears just now and the Ibiza has one for a spare - it came with just a squirty can of gunk so I had to buy a full size spare separately and when the time comes I'll buy another to match it. I also had them all round on my old 1.9tdi Cordoba and they coped well with the weight and torque of the diesel engine. Having seen so many hillclimb cars and club racers on Avons I've always wanted to try them and I,m very tempted to put a couple on the Ibiza soon.
I'm talking about pairs of tyres here aren't I and there's good reason for this. I'm not a great fan of rotating tyres around to different positions on the car. I think there was a case to be made back at the beginning of time, but not now. With most cars being front wheel drive today's cars will wear out the fronts much more quickly than the rears. So I run the fronts down until they are around the 2mm or just below. Then I move the rears, which will likely still have maybe 6mm on them (a new tyre will typically have 8mm of tread depth) to the front and put the new ones to the rear. I do this intentionally because then I have the older tyres on the front - but still with plenty of tread depth - so they are going to wear more quickly now so I don't end up with two sets of fronts worn out and a, by now, really old set of rears which may well be cracking due to age and with the newer tyres on the rear they will have marginally better grip - due to the "younger" rubber so the car, under extreme circumstances, will tend to understeer which is a much safer condition for your average driver to cope with than a cer which "flicks" into oversteer. I don't switch them diagonally either, just go N/S/R to N/S/F and the same on the O/S. Because the spare is so often a space saver (if you've got one at all!) I'll leave the spare out of this discussion. I also would always run identical tyres on an axle. So, just for example, maybe Barums on the front and Firestones on the rear. I would always try to avoid say having a Firestone on one side and Barum on the other, especially on the front. The tyre tests I talked about earlier highlighted how different makes of tyre can grip differently. We found that under heavy braking, if you mixed tyre makes on the same axle then as long as the tyre kept rotating the car would pull up reasonably straight but if the wheels were locked up then the different coefficient of friction between the road surface and tyre tread compound could cause the car to slew. I'm sure ABS would probably mitigate this to a large extent today but probably increase braking distance compared to having the same tyre fitted to both sides. I like also to have tyres with similar wear on either side of a driven axle so as to minimize the work of the spider gears in the differential. Worth mentioning here too that if you have a permanent 4 wheel drive system it's a good idea to always try to keep all 4 tyres with similar tread depths - so this is one of the few situations where I would regularly rotate tyres - Big differences in tread depth means relatively big differences in RPM from wheel to wheel and some All Wheel Drives really can't cope with this and will fail prematurely. Actually a big difference in wear, so say an almost bald tyre on one wheel and a brand new one on another, will sometimes trigger the Tyre Pressure warning light on the dash. So if the light lights and you've checked ypour tyre pressures and found them to be correct this may be why. Sometimes a TPS reset will settle it down.
What I do not like are all these really cheap budget names which seem to come and go. They should all comply with European standards and have the CE mark so shouldn't be unsafe but I've seen some pretty crudely made examples with very heavy shoulders or stiff casing constuction etc. I suspect that the technology is pretty basic too. My son had a set with a name I've seen before on the budget racks and whilst not bad in the dry, stopping in the wet was more an expression of intention than fact! Mind you they lasted for absolutely ages and in the end he scrapped them when I showed him the deep cracks which were staring to expose the fabrick cords! If you take a look at the bottom of this:
https://www.tyresavings.com/brands you'll see some of the multitude of weird names these tyres turn up with so it's not all that difficult to "clock" them.
Then there's Remoulds and part worns. I believe there is a place for remoulds, especially on lower powered motors which just toddle around the town all the time. Remould casings are subject to a quite rigorous examination before being accepted for processing so although generally my experience has been that they wear more quickly than a new tyre - but not always - their casings will be in good order. In my opinion you just can't say this about a part worn. You don't know to what abuse it may have been subjected during it's life and you need to check the build date (four figure letter on the sidewall ie 1214 would be 12th week of year 2014) if more than say 5 or 6 years old the rubber itself will have lost a lot of it's new resilience and it's ability to grip will be measurably less than when it was new regardless of how much tread is left on it. I know it's personal and often money related, but I'd never buy a part worn.
So, to directly answer your question, I may match the Barum in the boot to give me a pair for the front. The only problem with that plan is that although the wheel and tyre in the boot is a full size the rim itself is a steelie. So the tyre will have to be stripped off and refitted to one of the front alloys. I think I may end up buying the 2 Avons instead and anyway I really really want to try the Avons! I'm actually looking for a matching second hand alloy for the spare just now but haven't turned one up at a reasonable price yet - I know one will come along when the time is right though! Finally I'd say also that, although I'm going for a mid range tyre the price will always be a major decider for me so if my Avons are hardly being discounted at all but here's a bargain going on, say, the Falkens, I'll likely be buying the Falkens!
