Tires NANKANG or IRONMAN

I ran a pair of 225/45-15 CRS this year. Good grip, didn't mind getting hot, wore quickly.

Nankang NS-2R. Semislick tyre made for endurance.

With one set of this I made more than 1.000km on track.

And they are cheap.

I had a set of Nankang NS-25 UHP tires on my mazda 3 turbo sedan. They were great tires and handled really well. Got about 30k miles out of them. I was pretty pleased, they even did alright in snow.

Alot of people are snobs and your bound to have a bad batch out of the millions of tires sold yearly but modern tires still need to pass DOT certs so there's some form of quality control. Ironman make a terrific set of mud tires and all season sport tires for the price even though they don't last that long.

So to create some perspective, my AR1’s on a small light car (Miata), lasted for 5 track days. Assuming an average of 20 mins per session, and around four sessions in morning and four in afternoon, we can assume I’m doing around 160 minutes or driving per day. So in theory I put 13 hours on those tyres!

I use 245-45-17 but ironman gen 2s have slightly less grip, and will last about as long. Only big downside I noticed is off throttle the ironmans will "float" alot more than the 595s. I started running the ironmans when the federals started going out of stock everywhere this summer

I have a set of Nankangs on my Ghia. They are a decent tire, but don't expect tons of grip from them, and they're pretty hard.

I ran a set of NS2's years ago, they came on my B5.5 Passat. Grip wise they were acceptable in the dry, and pretty poor in the rain. Alot of my customers also ran them back then. I've never seen anything akward happen to one, no sidewall bubbles, blowouts, or failures. They aren't unsafe or bad tires, they were just always at the bottom of their category in terms of performance, refinement, grip, so I never considered buying a set. If my hands were tied in terms of availability, I would feel perfectly comfortable running Nankangs, especially on an application like a Figaro. I would go for it.

My i3 had nank’s. I destroyed the rears in less that 10k km.

I had been looking for a secondhand setup and got a great deal on these. I likely would not have chosen the Nankangs myself. Wet traction is awful, and I break loose from stoplights in dry conditions really often.