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It's time for new tires and I'm finding out that it's hard to get good tires for 16" wheels. Was looking at Potenza Sports and Continental extremecontact sport 02 wheels but can't find the 245s for the rears. Should I just get 225s instead? It's known that the OEM 225 SO2s were actually 245 so I'm trying to stick with that spec. Aside from getting new wheels, what are my options for summer max tires?
Every tire site is going to say 225/50-16 is correct for rear tires on an AP1, it's wrong. It needs to be a 245/45-16
Getting very slim pickings on 16" tires. Tire Rack doesn't list much of anything available, and Discount shows a Bridgestone Potenza Sport in the correct (205 & 245) sizes. Might be a Pirelli as well, but hard to figure out.
Every tire site is going to say 225/50-16 is correct for rear tires on an AP1, it's wrong. It needs to be a 245/45-16
Getting very slim pickings on 16" tires. Tire Rack doesn't list much of anything available, and Discount shows a Bridgestone Potenza Sport in the correct (205 & 245) sizes. Might be a Pirelli as well, but hard to figure out.
I had originally ordered those but then my Discount Tire called and told me they had no stock of the rears (245) and no timeline on getting more. So we cancelled the order. I can't be the only one that has this problem..so checking on here.
Every tire site is going to say 225/50-16 is correct for rear tires on an AP1, it's wrong. It needs to be a 245/45-16
No dog in this hunt but where are you getting the 245/45-16 as the correct rear tire size from? Owners manuals all specify 225/50-16.
245/45-16 tires are the same overall diameter and if they fit the wheel wells will work without messing up the speedo and anti-lock brakes. I'd certainly try that size. And they look better if you like wide rear tires like I do..
So, we're nearly a quarter century out from the S2000's introduction, and the OEM 16" tires haven't been available for years -- sounds like the perfect time to analyze them!
First, a reminder of what's long been known (and in fact was stickied at the top of the Wheels & Tires subforum back in 2002): the official tire sizes for the OE 16" rims were misleading, and are a big part of why the original AP1 had such a bad reputation.
In this post, I'll try to quantify how much "wider" the rear 16" tires *effectively* were, in terms of the amount of rubber available to put on the road. (To my knowledge no one else has actually tried to do this.)
Let's start with a look at the tires. Here's a photo of a new front/rear pair of the OEM Bridgestone Potenza S02s. (Front at left, rear at right.)
[Note: Image created from photos originally posted by [utag=21537]s2ka .]
Recall that while the Potenza S02 was a widely available line of tires, Bridgestone actually worked with Honda to develop the S2000's tires specifically for the car.
Now, the front tire was officially a 205/55R16 tire (205mm section width, 55% sidewall, 16" rim), and the rear was officially a 225/50R16 tire. Therefore we'd assume the rear tire was nominally 20mm (9.8%) wider than the front. The problem is this wasn't even close to being true. To see the real difference, let's digitally duplicate each tire and compare the two pairs:
And just to drive the point home, here's what they look like stacked flat against each other:
Folks, that's a lot more than 10% difference -- in fact, it's actually about a 15.3% "width advantage" for the rears! Again, this is not a photo editing trick: those of us who ordered new sets of these tires from Tire Rack can remember that they really did look like that when stacked side by side.
But that's just the beginning; there are two other *big* differences.
First, notice how rounded the edges of the front tires are, and how square the shoulders of the rear tire are. This means that the rear tire actually puts a bigger *percentage* of its section width on the ground than the front tire. So even if they were the same width, the rears would still effectively be "wider" just because of its shape! How much wider? This is harder to quantify, but let's conservatively call it a 5% "shoulder advantage".
Finally, notice how wide the tread *gaps* are on the front tire, and how narrow the gaps are on the rear tire. This means that a bigger percentage of the rear tire's contact "patch" is actually touching the ground. So even if the front tires were the same width *and* the same shape, the rears would STILL put more "rubber on the road". I actually tried to quantify this by processing the tread images so that the rubber was pure white and the gaps were pure black. Then I simply measured the percentage of each tread pattern that was pure white. Here's what I found:
In the left side of the image, we see that over 78% of the rear tire's contact patch is actually rubber; but for the front tire, the percentage is less than 72%! That's a "tread pattern advantage" of about 9% for the rear tire!
So let's put all this together: The total "grip advantage" of the S02 rear is the product of all of its advantages: grip advantage = raw width adv. * shoulder shape adv. * tread pattern adv ~= 1.15 * 1.05 * 1.09 ~= 1.32. So the rear S02 actually put down a little over 30 percent more rubber than the front!
So if the tire specs were made to reflect the actual difference in "rubber on the road", what would the AP1 stagger actually be? Well, as krazik points out in the link above, the rear tire would be rated as 245/45R16; therefore if the fronts are ~32% narrower, that's equivalent to a 185/60R16 front tire -- in other words, the tires actually have a whopping 60mm of "effective stagger"!
OK, fine, but the suspension was designed to accommodate the difference, so where's the danger? Well, there were plenty of owners who replaced those S02s with all-season tires, snow tires, or just a different brand of performance tire -- but of course they used Honda's specs, and bought "regular" 205 fronts and 225 rears. Suddenly the rear of the car had *far* less grip relative to the front -- with predictable results.
Finally, there's one more bit of danger inherent in the rear S02s: that narrow tread gap only got narrower as the tire wore down (and Honda advised owners it could wear in as little as 10K miles!). Here's a photo of a new one vs. a worn one:
That worn tire was fine in the dry, but it was a genuine handful in the wet. I vividly recall a white-knuckle highway drive on worn rear S02s in a rainstorm: I was hydroplaning at 45-50mph, while traffic around me passed serenely by at 70+.
The moral of this (too-long) story: if you still drive an AP1 on the OEM 16" rims, follow krazik's advice and at least get a 245 tire for the rear. You can also go narrower than 205 at the front (if you can find it), but the wider-than-spec rear tire is absolutely essential. But even if you're just interested in handling, it's good to know what F/R grip ratio the original suspension design was based on.
Stay safe out there!
Edit: P.S. I posted this here in the Suspension forum (rather than Wheels & Tires) for a couple reasons: this post is more about the effect of the tires on handling, rather than simple tire fitment (which the wheels forum is usually more concerned with); also the Wheels forum already has krazik's sticky post about getting 245 rears.
Edit 2: Lol as Doc Hudson said, I guess my mind's been changed for me!
Ah yes this is making the rounds a gain. Yes, the original S02s were closer to 245 than to 225. Yes It was common practices in the S2000 community to go with 245's in the rear to better match the OEM sizing, and yes, this was good advice back in the day. However...
There is very limited options in this size these days and hasn't been many in over a decade. Back around 2010ish when decent tires in 245 started drying up this was a big discussion point and the concensus that was reached among those of us who had experience truly pushing the S2000 (whether that is autox, track, etc...) was that is was far better to get a good tire in 225 than to get a lesser tire in 245. Looking at tire rack, the options for MAX or Extreme performance summer tires in 205/245 are the Bridgestone potenza Sport which is backorder indefinitely in 245, or the Yokohama A052 which runs very wide anyway and will be pinched in a detrimental manor on the 7.5in stock rear wheel (in fact I'd bet in 225 it is similar width to the old S02).
Therefore, I would not recommend trying to stick to a 245 like we did in the 2000s and instead pick a good tire in 225 and call it good. The Yokohama is overkill and super short lived if the ECS 02 is your target. I would just get 225 ECS 02s which will grip better than the original 245 S02s did anyway. Honestly the ECS 02 grips about as well as the 2010-2015 era 200TW extreme performance tires did which were better than the S02, but the ECS 02 lasts much longer and is great in the rain.
Thanks so much for this. Yes I can get larger wheels but I wanted to stick with the stock AP1 look for now. Appreciate the insight and this makes a lot of sense.
Modern day 225 is still too narrow, was 20 years ago and still is. S02 was a damn sticky tire.
it was damn sticky, for its time. But even back then the 140-200TW tires being used by the autox and track day crowd (such as Bstone’s own RE01R) were grippier than the S02, and the ECS 02 is grippier still than the old 140-200TW track/autoX focused tires. (Many Modern 200TW tires are a whole other level of grip beyond that). Tires have progressed a ton in that time. The options in 245/45-16 that are available to actually buy are, with the exception of the A052 less grippy than a 225 ECS 02. If you go with them, you will have less rear end grip than if you go with a 225 ECS 02. So we can sacrifice performance and rear end grip to stick to an old dogma that comes from a time when there were more 245/45-16 tire options, or we can get what will work best and give the most grip. Everyone can make their own decision but I’ll choose grip and recommend others do the same.
the only tire that is available in that 245 size that will outgrip a 225 ECS 02 is the Yoko A052 which runs so wide that its 225 has an even wider tread width than the unavailable 245 bridgestone potenza sport, and I will add that from experience that tire does not react well to being pinched so I would HIGHLY recommend only getting a 225 in that tire for stock AP1 wheels. I will also add that the tread width on the 225 ECS02 measured on a 7in rim is only 0.3in less than the 245 Potenza Sport on an 8in rim. When you account for the small reduction in effective tread width of the 245 and increase in the 225 from going to a 7.5in rim, you are going to be within about 0.1in in effective tread width on an AP1 rim.
Summer Max Tires for AP1 wheels in 2025
but where are you getting the 245/45-16 as the correct rear tire size from? Owners manuals all specify 225/50-16.
