Alfa Romeo Tire Center near Chicago, IL
Tires are an absolutely essential part of any good driving experience. Not just for the best performance, but for safety as well. This is all the more important for Alfa Romeo owners, since superb driving dynamics are likely what attracted them to Alfa Romeo in the first place. Joe Rizza Alfa Romeo put together this guide to give Alfa Romeo owners a sense of what they’re looking for while shopping for tires. We hope you find it helpful.
Tire Types
All-Season VS Winter VS Summer Tires
Weather can have a huge impact on how well your tires work, and different tires handle weather in vastly different ways. Summer tires are made with a highly heat-resistant compound and a shallow tread. This maximizes contact with the road in dry conditions, and makes for the best grip. Winter tires are made with a deep tread for channeling water, sludge, and snow away from the areas of the tire that contact the road. They’re also made from compounds that keep them flexible in cold conditions.
Somewhere between these two are all-season tires. These handle snow better than summer tires, and deliver a smoother ride with better grip in hot weather than winter tires. They tend to last a while too, which is what you want in tires that you’ll leave on your vehicle all year. While specialized tires will always perform better in the given season they’re made for, all-season tires provide a cost-effective alternative with less hassle.
Run Flat Tires
Run flat tires have one very distinct advantage over all other tires. As it says right in the name, they can be driven on while uninflated. This has limits, they can only be driven a limited distance and at a limited speed. But this is a lot more than you can do with regular tires, and it has allowed a lot of manufacturers to leave spare tires off of vehicles that have these tires, saving cost and weight. This might sound like the perfect tire, but it’s unfortunately not that simple. The reason that run flat tires can hold their shape without air in them is their incredibly stiff sidewalls. This translates into a stiff ride, and if you live somewhere where the roads are less than perfect, you’re going to feel those bumps and potholes that much more with run flat tires.
Performance Tires
In many situations, there isn’t a huge difference between a performance tire and a summer tire, and indeed the two terms are used interchangeably a lot. This is especially true of OEM tires, but if you bought a Quadrifoglio and want to take it to the track, some more specialized tires might be in order. But even just for road use, there are a variety of more performance-oriented tires that can provide more grip in the right circumstances. The downside to these is that they tend not to work so well in adverse weather conditions, and they also generally don’t last as long.