Follow me on the Barbarian Conan Odyssey of all tire reviews...

Driving-wise I've had more than enough of 2022, and I can't wait for winter to return. Jaguar's XE (a 25T RWD from 2017) is the only car I own right now, one of the last with the Ford-engine versions before they switched fully to their own Ingenium engines. The Ford for me has been venerable, consistent and easy to keep clean, even easy to tell when you're dirtying up the lines with bad petrol. The 2017 XE for me has been bewitching, and people can legitimately argue it is the superior of any of the re-engineered, re-weighted re-versions that came after it.
But next Spring will be my SECOND try at finding the right summer performance tires for this car.

It was a snap, a breeze, picking correct winter performance tires, Nokian Hakkapeliitta R3. Nice symmetrical tread pattern that sits flat and shockingly square at the tire's shoulder, Non-Studded, and weighing three pounds less than the OEM Conti ProContact GX tires---I don't believe I can find a quieter, more stable and smoother tire for an XE on bone-dry chaulky winter pavement (though I suspect Vredestien's Wintrac Pro could prove me wrong if I ever choose to give it a chance).

Even with these winter perf tires on, this five-year old sports sedan still leaps off with the tiniest extra pressure on the gas pedal (you XE owners know what "leaps" means in this car).
But that hair-bleaching acceleration that scares the pajamas out of nearly any friend or family I give a lift to, it isn't the feature I am forced to rely on the most in the places I drive. 97% of the time, that's Conn, NJ, and.... arguably the part of the world where alert drivers have avoid a collision by swerving more times per hour than a cat can lap in milk per hour. NY five boroughs! Bring your car hither, and Pray to Crom, puny men!.
You seldom hear us confess this, but drivers in the metro NY area drive every day in two ways, helter-skelter and desperately,... Laugh away any statements you've heard that we are "aggressive driving", "overly assertive driving", "Type-A personality drivers" NY drivers foist those terms to excuse our embarrassing lack of impulse-control, and low grasp of driving physics. When a driver has a hard crash and smashes into a Ducati motorcycle biker, cell phones call up 911. Ambulance rips through the streets, forcing nervous cars to jump the curb, scaring the hell out of old women pushing baby strollers. When the ambulance finally arrives, it picks up THE DUCATI (including the loose headlight sitting clear across the street) throws it in the back with the stretcher and rush away never to be seen again. TWO DAYS LATER, sanitation crews with putty knives scrape up the dead biker off the tarmac, like bits of the smushed cat you saw in your local street the other day.

I just saw a road-fight between a BMW and a mid-sized livery truck, and the the BMW lost. No, I mean it LOST, and it WAS a "fight"---the truck side-scrubbed the BMW as it tried to pass the tuck on the left, then as the BMW swerved around the back of the truck to attempt a pass on the RIGHT, the truck impaled the BMW against the retaining rails (yes, intentionally!) until the BMW's passenger side smoked to a stop on top of the railing (ala James Bond's car in a rightside wheelie that skinny alley in Diamonds are Forever) and the driver jumped out the open passenger window like those pilots bailing out in the WWII Spitfire.
... His tires looked a little like Potenza Sports---I couldn't be sure.
A scene like a tv cartoon, but it was real.

That incident was 23 days ago, four weeks after I've started reading around for "the best" UHP tire to buy. Test track? Track? Chaos take the track world! This city pavement overflows with more snakes and demons than a Frank Frazetta museum!
So I sit here yawning on my Taurus Oyster leather throne, I push my woman off of me, and I ask the question, if these Tri-state drivers are such road masters who acquire the best tires from the pro-reviewers to put on their wheels, why are they still pissed upon by the gods and left crawling out of wreckage?
Maybe "the best", " the grippy-est", that we snap up from the website reviewers and keep recommending on our forums is a cartoon too, and most of us are just wasting our gold following the queue to what the pro-reviewers suggest we are "supposed" to feel from that tire like the PS4S. Ha-Haa, are most of us owners on these forums top-flight track drivers, that actually require, or can even physically detect, those thin test-result differences in the tire brands on a typical drive? The BMW owner on the bridge wasn't.

Or for many of us, is our passion with the Michels simply because the performance requirements in our driving world are just laughably below what this tire was designed for (not counting maybe the few, truly regular track enthusiasts among us)? A god to whom I would bow, Enzo Moruzzi, what say you to PS4-S's?

 

........"Buy the Best MATCH, or buy 'the best' TIRE?"

Errr, "the best". Is it truly best? Is it best for a tire to grip and break late but suddenly so you leap out in fear...or is the best a tire to break early but progressively so you absorb and correct the break without fear?, "Can't go wrong with them"? Really so? Will your tested tire have "grippiest characteristics to achieve the best laps" when your Sacremento hilltop road is littered with broken shale stones? Did you get the "shortest reported wet-braking distance" when there was only enjoy 12 feet of luxury space in front your car on I-285 in Atlanta? **** on this. Best because the vet pros driving some BMW 3-series said so? To pro-reviewers with your test cars I repeat, "Come to THIS place, and pray to Crom, Then tell me what is "best" in Tire, puny men.

I once spent a whole summer (3 months) driving nothing but 2018 Ford Mustang convertibles, 220 highway miles, Bronx through Connecticut once a week. Blistering hot or Noah's flood rains. Every week, a different color Mustang, every one a convertible---every one on Pirelli PZero Nero tires. Neros are NOT top superb tires, they're performance tires by classification more than by achievement. But they are easily the "superb-MATCH" for that medium-length 3400 lb Mustang. Flat, nimble with minimal-sway on quick lane changes or on most turns. 98% of the time, they make you NOT care that they aren't "the best" at something, when they're ON A MUSTANG.

I read someone explaining why he gets winter performance tires for his sports car in winter instead of A/S or snow tires, and he said "I want to experience my car all year round, dry-sport steering on summer perfs in July, then dry-sporting steering on winter perfs in January". Hmmm, I like this driver's thinking! He doesn't put his sports car in storage for wintertime, and he found the kind of cold-weather performance tire (Vredestein) that are such fun he's in no hurry to take them off.

Yes, I gave up three bags of gold for this pricey Jaguar, but I'm no wealthy King who splashes money---if a thief steals just $10 from me, I'll want that thief's throat torn out, and so I want my to receive my car's full money value every time I sit in it. I want full driving fulfillment on EVERY little drive around the local Butter Belly Body gym. If my neighbor Raquella brags to me her Atlantean-7 tires are fantastic when she's on Lap-30 at Redding Track---I'll yawn, because that means her tires please her during the brief splendid hobby visits.,... but when I ask her how her tires are when she's driving her kids half an hour to karate class, if she answers "the Atlanean never gives me any trouble",... that translates in my mind that Raquella's tires are BORING 98% of the time.

The XE has some novel personality traits that could be shamefully pissed away riding on 98%-boring tires. The 2016/17 year versions are argued by reviewers and several forum threads as the nearly best of the model, more confident in the steering and the weight, better-tuned to its own acceleration than all the re-tweaked versions.
XE's do NOT have as quiet a cabin as the heavier XF or older XKRs. A "noisy" tire on an XE will drive you a little nuts for the first few months, even if it is UHP/Summer Max tire that you "should expect extra noise from". Personally I tended to fill my tires slightly above the optimal Jaguar-recommended pressures (many owners elect to go a bit under optimal instead, and that has its advantages too).Driving an XE can feel like the weird middle ground between a pop-top car and a Tesla: A convertible's open noise and the Tesla's super quiet cabin both prevent you from hearing pavement feedback.
Cars like the XE may turn out to be the last of the "road feedback" minded sport bodies, car bodies that transmit road sounds as an intentionally part of the experience. If transmitting road sounds to me is part of what this car was designed to do, I want to appreciate that too, just like much as I've learned to appreciate the selective exhaust growls I hear different car models make at different moments of the drive. I've driven an XFs and their too-soft tire suspension made me feel uncoordinated in many simple maneuvers---I once put too noisy a tire on my XE and kept struggling with mis-interpretation that the car's too heavy or moving too fast to MAKE the next maneuver properly, I'm not an expert driver who is able to separate that distraction from my mind very well. I know these were only some weird false illusions going on, but some others out there may understand what I mean from their car experiences.


An XE is also what I call very steering-responsive straight from factory, on plain DEFAULT settings. So much so, that the extra setting called Dynamic Mode in an XE makes the car feel twitchy and "ULTRA" responsive to a lot of XE owners at highway speeds. On some of the models XE drivers like to keep away from Dynamic Mode---it feels just TOO damn direct and obedient, forcing them to heed that EVERY little nudge on the steering wheel has an instant consequence. Forums still argue about which models "Dynamic" alters steering, and which models only alter pedal. 30 minutes of that kind of that level of directness COULD turn some of us into nervous chain-smokers! I don't know what the F-Type's or XF's Dynamic Mode feels like, but you owners have likely heard this complaint before about XE's.


And an XE's got a very biased aesthetic stance too: Even though in a challenge it can easily leave other drivers' ***** red raw and needing Prep-H----it tries NOT TO LOOK like it can do that--it wears sexy but ADULT body curves that let you innocently give your corporate boss a lift to the office without him realizing what wild thing he's been riding in. Many of us drivers are vested in that grown-up look when we're on the street, right down to the sidewalls of the tires (something these street players in some of our cities look at and try to judge your car by). There's a real need to consider looks on an XE's tires.

 

Bridgestone's Potenza Sport or Michel's PS4-S look like someone wrapped a flat heavy band of clay around your wheel. Should a performance car wear heavy-looking wheels while it's parked at the curb? Valka, what is this-?
And being honest the PZero is not a chic looking sedan-style tire either. Pirelli's product tends to have a very pro-circuit looking, with a racy-pimpish slope to the shoulder that reminds me a little of the "stretched tire" look that's still popular with some illegal racing crowds here in the Northeastern US. What's that gonna look like on these XE and XF cars? Adolescent??? High-dollar No-prep king?? Underground racer on boosted tires??

Goodyear and Falken tend to have an EXCESS of decorative raised-rim lettering that clogs with dirt as badly as my 1990's snow tires---even with a good tire dressing, they can't keep clean looking.



My stock-Continental tires felt like actually a really balanced factory pick for northeastern US driving. But I knew under my skin that I was running with them inflated just beyond safe max, in order to squeeze out more and more of that delirious steering spirit that we can taste in this modern Jaguar. Although the Contis still gave me a reasonably soft ride when I technically over-bloated them, they'd skip and remind me that I was demanding too much from them (especially in Spring and Autumn conditions). I'm obviously too much of a barbarian to be a track hobbyist, Fate has made me a King of wet streets, but clearly what I am in need of, most Touring tires won't satisfy.

I experimented with Nokian's only second official attempt to make a solid summer UHP tire, the Powerproof, and it turned out to be a regretful lesson in what happens when you ignore your car's precision-engineering.

Mark me however, BOTH models of tire have some of the finest sidewall designs for a closet-accelerator like the XE. Their UHP tires (Firestone Firehawk too) have the right sleek-n-lightweight sidewall to compliment the mature-n-potent look of these cars, that says "mature sedan-sport" without looking like "I wanna race your muvva". With the right amount of dressing, the subtle micro-cuts and those pop-rivet dots on the Nokian make it the most fantastic sidewall I'd ever want on an XE. Sportiness without pretentious racy-ness.



....Winter approaches, Barbarian.
I will be refitting my Nokian H3's in the next 4 weeks, while armies post their flags for my study. I will always call Nokians by their name, but the others I think of mostly by their countries, Vredestein the Nethers, Pirelli the Italian, Bridgestone the Japan, Conti the Germans, Michellin the French (the favorite of mine from younger FWD days) I shall not drive on summer-perf tires until warm Spring in NY, but I won't wait for cold Autumn to buy them. This axe best strikes in the next 5 weeks, purchase and wheel-mounting must be made by then.

...But, don't you already know what maker I will be buying?
Whaa?? That one??!
Why should someone want to try something that the hobby track-drivers are spitting on, calling it an &%-ing blob of garbage, and vile snot like that?

Why the hell NOT buy PS4 or PS4-S?! What are you, NewLester, a bigot against France?


LOL, I'll explain why not, after I've bought the tires and prepared them for branding in my Hell.
My ugly driving kingdom will prove to me whether my choice in summer tire preserves me as a king in my land, or lands me on the sidewalk and tosses a bottle of Vaseline in my lap for me to rub on my sore, umm,... wounds.


I'll let you know next Spring...

 

I've had a few sets of PS4S on my F-type. One thing that doesn't get mentioned often is their performance in the wet, which is quite good. While I don't drive the F-type in the rain if I can avoid it (that's what the XE is for, and winter), I've been caught in some epic thunderstorms, and I'm not sure I've ever felt the PS4Ss hydroplane, which I found quite surprising (in a good way.)

 

I am beginning to learn how wretched most of those so-call expert pro-reviewers are in their reports. Every tire design stems from a HISTORY, almost like a lineage, that can explain why one tire is less likely to serve a King where the PS4-S you mention tire would succeed. The French sharpened their tire design not on TRACK firstly, but on LeMans, lwhere the drivers INTEND to keep racing each other fast in the rain (LeMans is an endurance race), where typical race track principles are for the drivers to SLOW DOWN if their track-race is suddenly caught by rain.

To the south is a Prince who says his tire is better because it aquaplanes EARLIER, but it gives warning before sliding, and is far easier to recover out of the slide.
To the west is a Shah who says his tire may not give any warning before it loses traction, but will hold its traction seven miles an hour faster than the Prince's.

Which ruler has been blessed with the better tire?


I can trust the words of a 8 year veteran in F-Type driving. And you also know the feel of an XE by comparison. Does an F-Type with the Michels make you feel more aware of the pavement you're driving on----assuming your F-Type originally came with OEM touring tires, does driving wet road or gravel paths now sound and feel "more important" and engaging to you now?
Or does the Michel tire seem to transmit the same about subtle terrain changes as your OEM tires did?
A feeling having nothing to do with "road grip" or "confidence" or "noise of a summer tire",... but a feeling that a F-Type-to-XE driver like you would have some tactile conclusions about (and one experience a heavier XF or XK driver would miss out on).

 

I found the OEM P-Zeros were sensitive to tramlining, which I hate. Don't really notice it with the Michelins. This is mostly an issue on expressways, where my F-type has spent a LOT of time. (Annual roadtrips to MI and back, a 5000 mile pandemic roadtrip to the Rockies, etc.)

Some talk about the predictability of the rear end letting loose - whether it's sudden or progressive - but I don't drive near the edge of grip, so I can't comment on that. I've tracked the F-type twice - the first time on the OEM P-Zeros (with an instructor), the other by myself on a closed track with the Michelins. The instructor hated the P-Zeros; I had a hoot at the Palmer (MA) track on the Michelins, thought I certainly didn't get them with track use in mind.

I won't claim to be an expert in tires. I didn't like the P-Zeros, and when it was time to dump them, the forum was raving about the Michelin Pilot Supersport ('MPSS'), so I went with those. Liked them, so went with the PS4S when it replaced the MPSS.

Last edit: the P-Zeros came off around 2015, so I don't claim to remember a lot about them. I'll also say: Jag recommends 36psi all around for the F-type, but I like the feel of them with 38psi.

Also - the F-type doesn't have a great feel of the road through the steering wheel in general, but I'm happy with the tires, steering and handling. I find on back country twisty roads, one only has to go maybe 10MPH over the speed limit to have a nice feel of carving corners. They also don't explode at 142MPH, but I won't tell you how I know that.

 

Most of the Hell in my territories don't even make the news anymore... Drivers "drive" how they drive in my NY, just as the soil is the soil, the air the air, and pain is pain. "What of it?", they'll say, if you comment on their driving. Or "to hell with you", if you comment on their driving.
...But ever so often, we make our own headlines...

https://autos.yahoo.com/video-shows-...171800669.html

 

Lovely enchanting prose .Three cheers for the Hakkapelitta R-3,s I hear the R-7's or perhaps R-9's even better. We'll find out in several years when the threes wear out. Happy new year

 

And now, now, winter is more nearly over than half begun.
I have not forgotten this decrepit tale I started. I bought the tires as planned, but they stored away in near perfect summer-tire hybernation condition, in the cool dark beneath my dry basement stairs for five months, where one spider builds her kingdom across 4 plastic bags in the darkness... I have yet to test them in the heat of combat, and I'm growing anxious. What is a test, without blood, no?

On the last evening commute in December, two street racers compete their skills trying to kick the next traffic light ---as the second racer comes up fast in my rear mirror, I fast-swerve into the lane beside me to shut him down from using that lane---"a Jaguar XE is driving here now, take your expensive games someplace else, scratching dogs!"


I think heavily on that accident in December, the 23-year veteran cop in an Chevy Implala swallowing a BMW head-on when a learners-permit 16-year old, accelerating his blue M-5 and knowing nothing about vehicle physics, broke traction on all 4 tires and skated sideways across all 5 lanes, right into the oncoming lanes. Right into the cop's face.

I think heavily...there was a center median to the cop's left--he would have sidestepped death if he swerved the Impala onto that median for 3 seconds--the oncoming BMW might have slid by him completely.

In early January, a Mercedes driver on "poke-fit" wheels must have rear-ended a truck, because he was sitting on the shoulder with the emergency blinkers going, with the front of the car wearing that famous upraised hood look, like a patient with a cleft-lip. After he sat crippled on the shoulder for a while he floored his throttle and got back on the expressway, weaving and stabbing through the traffic like a tantrum-child weaving around the room looking for something to push over and smash. You can suspect he's mostly angry at himself, for crippling himself---but even crippled, he's making himself a threat to the rest of us.

Hakkapellita R3 tires on a re-trimmed XE give a flat luxury-like steadiness during straights on the expressway, excellent water/slush control with very little splash during rainstorms, a minimum of squatting during acceleration that many think is cool but I dislike, and zero nose-diving during braking---some of the noble signatures of driving an XE.
I am enjoying my every quiet drive home on the expressway in the night. Hardly a single revving growl, no need. Yet I grow anxious.