Scottish Elises

I was really pleased with my now well worn R888's. I was working out what they had been through and its:

I think it's about 6,000 miles of road use plus:

1.5 dry days at the ring .

A hot dry day at spa.

A dry day at Andrew Walsh's airfield.

2/3rds of a wet+dry day at Cadwell.

The backs are now close to needing to be replaced, but in all that time, they have worked really well in the dry (obviously) and the wet too, even coming home from Cadwell in all the standing water at a fair pace.

In fact, I think they represent a very good compromise for up here in Scotland because they are a bit cheaper than 48s, you get reasonable mileage from them (9,000 road miles would be easily achievable) and they have fantastic cold and wet grip. I think you may well get two sets of rears to one set of fronts if you don't force understeer too much. At that point I think you must be getting close to AD07 cost/mile and better performance to boot.

Cheers,
Robin

Walshy was commenting on the LoT thread that the R888's are better in the wet, and only fractionally slower in the dry, compared to 48's. like you say, thats a much better compromise for scotland.

I might try 888's next, although current plan is just to use advans or BFG's from now on.

Once the 48's are worn out on the front I'll be sticking with R888's all round.

Cheaper, last longer, very little difference from 48's

kenny wrote:Once the 48's are worn out on the front I'll be sticking with R888's all round.

Cheaper, last longer, very little difference from 48's

Snap

How much was the full set Robin?

simon wrote:How much was the full set Robin?

Pass Around 500 quid I think.

Jim Dickson (Cumbernauld) was quoting 130+VAT fitted rears and 75+VAT fitted fronts, i.e. 482 for a complete set fitted.

That was a year ago now though.

Cheers,
Robin

shooomer wrote:And they handled those motorway conditions on way up

LOL. It was about as bad as I have ever driven in I think - only exception was Stelvio when we were going through the Monaco tunnels (me, Tut and JD) with inches of water stepped at the ends - hitting those at 60 was scary!!

Cheers,
Robin

How do we get club prices instead of normal retail?

Ronnie at Wheelsaround can do rear S2 size R888's for 250 ish fitted.

kenny wrote:Ronnie at Wheelsaround can do rear S2 size R888's for 250 ish fitted.

That's only £14 less than 48s
Was expecting it to be a bit more than that tbh.

They were around 200 for the two rears last year but I think prices may have gone up a bit. Not sure what he is selling the 48's at right now.

Still cheaper than anywhere else (fitted price) though.

The last set of R888's that I had from John Duthie were £360 fitted and balanced.

tut

ps when the tread gets to 2mm or less, they are bloody awful in the wet, especially on the track.

I could not get near Ali in 2005 in the Scottish Sprint at KH in the wet, when he was on Neovas.

tut

Well 2mm is only 0.5mm away from being illegal, so not a huge concern for road users

It was wet at Cadwell Park and I didn't feel like I would rather have been on road tyres anyway - but I wasn't pushing it much, so perhaps road tyres would still have been better if trying harder.

My fronts still have way more than 2mm at present - I hope to squeeze another complete set of rears out of them, as it were ...

Cheers,
Robin

Robin got to work on me tonight and I too am very interested in 888's to take over as my summer/track wheel tyre. His real-life "review" says a lot. And if I can get close to £360 for a set (S1 sizes obviously) then that's got to be good value.

It's definitely the wet performance of this kind of semi-slick tyre that needs the scrutiny, as there is nothing to spoil a nice run (which started off dry!) than feeling you need to tiptoe around to get home in one piece *. I had a terrible time on Maxsports coming back from Machrihanish on one occasion, almost convinced myself to junk 'em but saw sense and decided to get the wear out of them first! Never again though...

Campbell
(cautious faction)

* - note, this does not apply to Neil, Tut, and other regular nutters