Best Tires for the MINI Cooper

The tires are fine but wear out ridiculously quickly; so quickly it costs you money vs Michelin! I decided to buy something more mid range, I am happy with Kumho currently as I find Michelin ridiculously overpriced

On road it's like having a semislick which is capable of handling water showers like an UHP tire. On track you can feel it's not a semislick, but you can enjoy a stable performance allowing you 100% of fun with 80% lap time or something like that.
On the road wear on external shoulder is high, on track it's really impressive lap after lap.

These tires seem to popular because several garages stock them,and say they are one of the best sellers.Well they have proven to me that they are not very good at all, grip in dry and wet conditions are rather poor,and I don`t drive fast by any means,they just seem like bog-standard cheapies to me.
In cold conditions they are very poor,almost no grip in icey or snowy condtions,I was surprised just how bad they are.
Garage told me they are designed in UK but made in China,well that`s all rather meaningless,quality wise I would rate them as poor budget tires at best.
I know other people that have bought them,and they found them to be poor on ware and grip,so it`s not just me.
Don`t believe the hype,these tires are not much good, spend a bit more on a known brand.

The tires grip well but they will 'skip' on some corners with a bumpy surface which is scary! Ive been using this tire model for over 40K miles but have decided runflats are just to harsh on the car itself and they wear so quickly on my 2012 Mini Cooper JCW with it's camber!

Noise levels is good, grip dry or wet more than I need. The big surprise is how comfortable they are for 40 series tires. Too early to judge wear.

Second time I’ve encountered this tire as OE fit and the same outcome. Handling is bland to rubbery with no feedback and no confidence they’ll perform in bad weather consequently. Very quiet on smooth tarmac which makes the transition to surface dressed roads very noticeably noisier. As they age they get noisier. They can also feel lumpy at times they shouldn’t and at least once felt incredibly detached from the steering. A feeling I’ve never had before that both odd and disturbing. I was turning left on a dry road near home on a warm day when I got the feeling that I knew where we were going, the car (26 MY Mini Cooper C) knew but the tires hadn’t got the message! This was at about 15mph. Changing shortly.

These tires are decent for mild road driving but my god do they have soft and floppy sidewalls. I do quite a bit of spirited driving in these (and 1 track day a year) and the front tires chunked badly on the outer shoulders after about 7 months. As a point of comparison the stock tires on my Mini (before I changed them out) handled the same level of driving for much longer without chunking. Not buying them again.

On the track they get greasy after ~10 minutes. They are really good in the rain though.

Don't really understand why they made these performance tires so floppy. They work great if you're not doing much hard cornering - but if that's the case you don't need UHP summers to begin with.

Being said I have driven these tires for only 350km I can only give my impression about the starting life of these tires, about 1000-1500km should be performing better, I have a Mini Cooper S R56, a very handling car, I have been using SemiSlick almost these 10 last years ( Federal RSR 595 and the new upgrade) the differences in this car bewteen both tires are not huge, The semis in 1200kg front traction car are very difficult to warm up in the rear-end, even trying to adjust the pressure, but the Kumho as they work in a fewer temp range you feel the rear very stable, the handling input seems quite similar than Federal in terms of precision, my driving style has always been very pointly with input so changing the Federal for these Kumho has made to me change my driving style, the huge amount of grip makes the car very neutral, I didn't find any understeering situation, but it's true the rear never will want to overtake you, it's always sticked tl the ground, that combined with seems there is a short gap between the max grip snd the lack of grip makes me a little bit unconfident finding the max grip over lateral load. But for the price that these tires cost it a must, you can go very fast without compromising safety, no snaps or understeers and you can go very comfortable going calm, the tires dont sound a all ( to me, maybe for others they sound a lot, but Im comparing with a semi that over 30-40km you were hearing the tire eating the ground)

For the price they run premium brands very close, but they wear faster, particularly on a FWD car with lots of torque.

At the time I purchased these, they were the only all-weather tire in size 205/45 R17 I could find in North America. It was my first experience with Vredestein. They are excellent in the wet, including cold and wet, and while driving spiritedly. They’re good in the dry, although breaking distance is average. They’re surprisingly okay in the snow! I wouldn’t use them as dedicated winter tires in Canada, but they managed well in fresh snow, packed snow and uphill on slippery packed snow. The tire is marketed as being performance-oriented, which is a bit of a stretch. It does handle well, but under high torque, the tires tend to take a second before finding their grip.
The biggest downside of these tires are the sidewalls which are on the softer side. Actually, after hitting what felt like a small pothole, the tire ripped across the sidewall and tread. That kind of tear was too catastrophic to be repaired. At the time, I could not source a replacement tire in Canada, which is when I decided to swap all four tires for something different.