I finally decided this week to order new tires – swimming against the tide, I chose 205/55WR-16 Avon Tech M550 A/S tires.
I was swayed by the excellent ratings on TireRack across the board – traction in wet, dry and snow conditions all rate well, as does comfort; the tire is not available in 205/50 so I chose the 205/55 in the belief that there won’t be an issue – I can’t imagine a tire diameter about 0.3″ bigger than stock being a significant difference, and opinions on the NAM tire forum confirmed this.
The tires arrived today, so I headed down to MINI of Peabody to get them installed (an extra benefit of having MoP do the work – as well as my confidence in them – is that GBMINI#3 is once again clean!)
I took some old and new tire comparison shots, to see if the wheels were significantly bigger – and I really don’t see any cause for concern! Remember also I was going from an undersized tire (205/50 is smaller diameter than the stock 195/55); the change going from a stock runflat 195/55 to the 205/55 would be even less significant:
If you want to compare different wheel/tire sizes, a great website is the Wheel & Tyre Bible which has masses of information including a calculator that shows the 205/55R16 being 5mm radius more than the 195/55R16 (the Indycar team partly owned by David Letterman! Good luck Bryan – though I’m sure you won’t need it 🙂
M&I / GBMINI 