The Bridgestone Potenza Sport AS Makes a Case for the All-Season
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I’ve long been a proponent of using dedicated summer and winter tires. On all my cars, I always had two sets, generally swapping summers for winters around Thanksgiving, and back again in late March or early April. Lately, though, I started to wonder why. So, I put a set of Bridgestone Potenza Sport AS tires on my car.
It came down to a question of use case. With my last car, a 2007 Boxster, it seemed to make sense to have a good summer tire to provide optimal performance in warmer weather, and to switch to a winter tire for when the temperatures dipped below 40 degrees, or when there was snow on the ground.
The reality went like this—I never drove the summers to anything like their maximum capability, and I never tracked the car. They were used for spirited, but not limits-pushing drives, and more often, they were used for running around the city and on long highway trips. In other words, not the driving for which you need a high-performance tire. As for the winters, it was basically the same thing. While I took my car out in the snow a couple of times, I found that it was all too easy to get it beached, so I mostly let the Porsche sit in inclement weather. Not helping matters is that New York City winters are also getting more mild, and I don’t commute by car anyhow.
On top of all that, I live in an apartment and consequently don’t have a place to store an unused set of tires. I left them with family in an increasingly packed garage and was only able to change them when I was visiting. And then there was the cost of swapping between them. I could’ve nabbed a second set of wheels, but used OEM units would have cost well over $1000 for my car. So, I had to pay a couple hundred bucks to have someone remount and balance tires twice a year.
I recently sold my Boxster and bought a 2017 Volkswagen GTI. Lovely car, but it came on a set of no-name-brand tires I wanted to get rid of ASAP. Considering my use case, ultra-high-performance (UHP) all-season started to look like a good solution. Plus, as a car reviewer, I was curious about the evolution of this kind of tire. Surely with the furious pace of tire development, a modern UHP all-season would compare well with a summer tire of just a few years ago.
By pure coincidence, Bridgestone reached out to Road & Track and offered up its new line of Potenza tires to test. I fit a set of Potenza Sport AS rubber to the stock 18-inch wheels of my GTI in the OEM 225/40R18 size.
“Over the years, we’ve really seen this category grow,” says Dale Hariglle, chief engineer for consumer replacement tires at Bridgestone Americas. “We’ve pointed out that you can buy a brand-new Corvette with all-season tire, so that speaks to the industry position of all-season tires.”
These tires are not “Severe Snow Service” rated, so if you live in an area with heavy snowfall totals, don’t expect miracles. Nor should you expect to clean house at your local autocross. The goal here is to offer a bit of everything an enthusiast might want or need.
I’ve put close to 400 miles on these tires in a mix of conditions and scenarios. I've been commuting to the office, logging a couple hundred miles on the highway after Thanksgiving, and dutifully subjected these Bridgestones to a spirited rip up some of the best roads in the area. I was certainly not pushing the limits of capability for tire or car, but it made for a good representation of the sort of driving I do regularly. Unfortunately (rather typically), it hasn’t snowed since I’ve installed these tires, so I can’t report on their abilities in those conditions.
The first striking thing is the steering. Suddenly, my car had feel and precision that it never had before, rivaling some of the nicest-steering cars on sale today. Hariglle says that a lot of this comes from the solid center rib on the tire. He adds that this tire was tuned specifically in mind for cars like mine, and other entry-level performance cars like the Subaru BRZ/Toyota GR86. In a tire like this, the subjective matters as much, if not more, than objective measurements. “That steering feel that you mentioned, that’s what’s going to cause someone to tell their friends about it,” he says.
Look at the Potenza Sport AS’s tread pattern and you will find a lot of sipes. These squiggly lines across a tread block are designed to promote snow grip. Snow sticks well to snow, and the sipes in a tire are designed to pack with snow for better traction. But you’ll never see sipes on a performance summer tire. That's in part because there’s no expectation for snow performance there, but also because the sipes move around and reduce dry grip.
This tire addresses that problem in an interesting manner. “The [sipes] are actually 3D printed and they have a 3D profile that extends down into the tread surface,” Hargille says. “So, what happens under acceleration, braking, and cornering in dry conditions, the tread blocks will actually lock together, so it acts as if it’s a larger block like you would have on a summer tire. But in the wet or winter when you’re not pushing the tire to quite that extreme, the sipe opens up and allows for that biting edge to promote traction and handling.”
While I couldn’t test the snow benefit of the sipes by the time of writing, I can say that the tires do provide excellent grip in dry, mild conditions. The front of my GTI darts into corners, with the rear following obediently, and while there isn’t a ton of adjustability mid-corner in this car, traction on exit is superb, the limited-slip differential allowing you to get back to power quickly.
Frankly, I wasn’t left wanting. Maybe if L.A.’s Angeles Crest Forest was on my back doorstep, I’d want a sticker summer tire. But if I lived in L.A. I’d hardly ever have to worry about snow, or even cold temperatures in the first place.
Outside of spirited driving, there’s not a lot to fault with the Potenza Sport AS. The ride quality and fuel economy are both great, though there is a lot of tread noise at 65 MPH and above. That might have more to do with my specific car than anything else, but if you’re considering this tire, keep it in mind.
A tire like this, by nature, is a compromise. Hargille estimates that this has about the same dry-weather performance as a summer tire of 10 years ago and leagues more snow and wet-weather capability. But, while there has been much advancement in tread-pattern and design, it’s impossible to make a compound that works as well at 0 degrees ambient as it does at 100. Today’s compounds are remarkable things, offering a huge bandwidth of performance, but no tire manufacturer can do the impossible.
All that said, my GTI itself is a compromise. It’s not the fastest or most fun hot hatchback out there, but at the expense of performance comes livability. Ideally, you want multiple specialty tools to do multiple jobs, but I can’t have more than one car now. (Hell, having even one car in New York City is both a luxury and also an enormous pain in the ass.) Fast, fun, efficient, comfortable, practical, the GTI is the best all-rounder for my purposes.
This Bridgestone tire makes a good match for the GTI. It’s not a tire that I’m going to push to any particular extreme. It’ll more often be my choice for very mundane driving than anything else, one that doesn’t give up on sporty handling and feel.
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