I was driving into San Antonio on I-35 today and got caught in a heavy rain. This made me realize something about the AP2 in comparison to my AP1...

The AP2 seemed to handle 10 fold over the AP1 in the rain. I'm sure part of it is the different tire setup of my 05 compared to the 00 model I had. The car didn't feel loose at all and held the road very well where as my 00 would hydroplane very easily...

Anyone else notice this?

 

Any tire differences? In my experience, that is by far the #1 determinant for how well a car handles in adverse conditions (rain/snow/ice..etc).

 

Yeah, the 00 model was running S02's and the 05 I'm running the stock RE050's. i know the wider contact patch will help, plus the RE050 is a better wet traction tire. I was just suprised how much better it felt in the rain...

 

Actually, wider tires should hurt wet driving. Less weight per square inch of contact patch makes hydroplaning easier.

 

It's all about the tread and the materials -- and yes width will be a factor, depending on the tread pattern.

I've heard good things about the RE050. I've enjoyed the S-03s for a few years now since I upgraded my '02 to 17" rims in '03... The S-02s were very good, sticky tires in warm, dry conditions... But, the grooves were pretty small, and the tires turned to bricks in cool weather (so do the S-03s for that matter).

 

My MY04 with the RE050's feels VERY much more stable, communicative, and flat out drivable in the rain than my MY00 with ANY of the 5 or 6 sets of MAX performance tires and any of the alignment settings I ran on that car with 16" or 17" wheels in any configuration of stagger and tire width. It was just always sort of 'twitchy' in the wet no matter what parameters were dialed in. My all stock 04 is extremely well behaved in the rain. Just my observation I'd hate to see this degenerate into yet another ridiculous AP1 vs AP2 threads.

 

So, were you, you know, singing in the rain? Maybe it's just as well that there were no witnesses.

 

I agree...I don't want this to go that route...but I did want to post my observations in case someone searched for wet handling comparison of the two.