205/50 BFG Rivals
 

Got mine, got them mounted on my 8" Gen 1 6UL's. Each mounted combo came in at 34.2 lbs.

Comparison pic: 205/50 BFG Rival on 8" vs 225/45/ RS3 on 9".

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...1&d=1362798979

Got them onto the car, notice the awesome leaking out

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...1&d=1362799107

First drives tomorrow.

Edit: I see the 205 is in stock.

How do you like?

Off topic but I never noticed your lip spoiler until now. What is it?

EDIT: Nevermind, I read your build thread.

Nice! How are they? I need to get mine mounted.

I've put about 40 miles on them so far. I like them a lot. I haven't done any performance testing, for obvious reasons, but they ride very well at 26psi. The 205's on an 8" wheel don't tramline at all.

What's road noise like, Mobius?

Pretty quiet imo. I like them more in every way than my Yokohama Avid H4S's on my stockers (205/45R16).

can you get a 3/4 angle to see how wide or stretched they are on the wheels.

Did you have any issues getting them balanced? The shop uses a spin balancer and suggested taking it somewhere with a road force setup to see if it's the tires or his (old) machine. Each wheel (15x8 gen2) has 2.5-3oz of weight, the RS3s these replaced were all around .5oz.

This sucks, I have a track day this weekend.

I just use my local Les Schwab, and talk to the guy beforehand to make sure he puts the outer weights inside the curve of the bell so the weights clear the calipers. They have a road force.

You have all week. Surely you can track down a Road Force in that time!

To elaborate on the picture, I don't think they look stretched. They have a big rim protector, which is what makes them look stretched in the first photo.

I ran them at stock 26 psi cold pressure. Given that it was about 50 out, and the runs were 40-odd seconds, they never really got hot. The wear marks on the the blocks that wrap around the outside shoulder only go a bit past the corner. It looks to me that the sidewalls held their shape very well and didn't roll over hardly at all. Average sustained G's were probably about .65. That sounds unimpressive, but you have to understand that particular parking lot is incredibly bumpy and is low traction. There's lots of dust & broken pavement marbles, and moss (moss!) in a number of areas.

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...1&d=1363648114

Leave it to me to blow something way out proportion. The shop re-balanced all 4 and found 2 that were slightly off. I'm not sure what his definition of slightly is, but it made a world of difference. Previously at 75mph the world was a vibrating mess, now it's smooth as hustler's sexy ass. It was seriously undrivable with the horizon bouncing up and down.

I did learn today these tires can't be mounted on an 8" wheel. Our favorite wheel-stealing, great tire selection/price company told me so. :jerkit:

All I can say now is :party::party:

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1363649006

So them there is 205's ? On 8's? That "can't be mounted that way?"

Why can't they be mounted on a x8?

Lawyers?

Nay-sayers?

Ding ding ding. In TR's defense BFG says the same thing on their website.

I may have mentioned it in another thread also...TR told me over the phone that they wouldn't mount 225/45 on a 9" wheel. My hand almost teleported through the phone to smack the guy.

I figured that, I just wanted to make sure there wasn't a real reason for this.

How good are the rivals in the wet/as a DD tire?

I'm seriously considering either 15x7 or 15x8 C1M/6UL with the 205 Rivals as a DD tire.

Saturday was a wet autocross day, they did pretty well. The tread pattern is not optimized for water evacuation, so lots of water is not so good, but they stick pretty well at ambient temperatures.

Enough! You've driven them! You've autocrossed them wet and dry! You've even turned them into smoke!

How about a review already. ;)

Well ok. I will first qualify myself with the disclaimer that I am not a driving expert, but I play one on interwebTV.

The quality of my review suffers from the quality of my driving. I am not caught up to where the car is. I know I was leaving a lot of time on the table due to not knowing how much left I had in the car. In 8 runs I hit one cone, so you could rightly say I was not aggressive enough.

They tolerate large slip angles well. They seem to have a large traction plateau; if you go past the peak, traction doesn't go away quickly. The start making noise somewhere on that plateau.

Sadly I did not take video of Saturday's runs. I should have. My mistake. The course was wet but no standing water. My best time on Saturday was a 45.1 which was very close to a prepped Boxster on Hoosiers. Sunday was the same course, but reversed, and dry; best time was 40.9. I feel there was more time left on the table on the wet course than the dry course.

Conditions: Saturday, wet, ambient mid 40's Fahrenheit. Sunday, dry, upper 50's with sunshine; track surface was much warmer.

As mentioned earlier, I ran a relatively low 26psi cold pressure. Tires never got more than mildly warm to the touch even on Sunday with 8 runs about 12 minutes apart. As you can see from the picture above showing the wear line on the tread blocks, there was very little lateral flex of the sidewall.

An 8" rim is totally right for the 205 tire. They are a quantum step beyond having my 225 RS2's on the 8" rims. Steering feel is much better. Undesirable feedback such as tramlining on freeway ruts is essentially non-existent. The car goes where you steer it.

The next step is to compare them to my 225 RS3's on my 9's. I can't do that until April 15th. That will be a track day, and I'll run both. With data collection. And then post comparison times. All for you, my bithces!

I will say I feel they are successful enough that I am finding myself wanting another pair of 9's and putting 225 Rivals on them, to use as my autox/wets, and move my other 9's to something like 205 RR's or 225 NT01's, or, or, ... dare I say it - 205 Hoosier R6's. Ooh. This would be a next season move though, and would probably require me to sell my 8's.

Another metric to compare my car by - a 2500lb 240z with an LS swap on Hoosiers with a good driver went 40.1 where I went 40.9. Rivals kick ass.

Oh, and ... Murrika!

The 8 runs from Sunday. They get progressively faster. Run 6 is where I find the bounds of turn-in traction, and drift part of the 360 circle. Run 8 is the fastest. Interestingly, Run 6 is second fastest, despite the gobs of time I lost going sideways.

My best time was 40.9. FTD was a 38.9, set by an Evo on Dunlop Z2's. It's tough to beat Evo's. I left a lot of time on the table and Dallas is a good driver.

For reference, here are the raw times for the day down to me. I am pleased with where I ended up, I know I can climb into the cars ahead of me, and every single one of them is more expensive than mine. Sometimes by an order of magnitude.

Raw Pos. Pos. Class # Driver Car Model Raw Time Diff. From 1st
1 1 NP-S 152 Dallas Cutler 2005 Mitsubishi Evo 38.904 0.000 0.000
2 2 NP-S 80 Ryan Otis 2003 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 39.566 0.662 0.662
3 1 NP-R 457 Stephan Ryabinin 1974 Datsun 240z 40.067 0.501 1.163
4 1 I1 15 Michael Pinto 1971 Porsche 914 40.273 0.206 1.369
5 1 I2 12 Kathy Smalley 2000 Porsche Boxster 40.274 0.001 1.370
6 3 NP-S 521 Brian Brummell 2005 Mitsubishi Evo 40.373 0.099 1.469
7 2 I2 211 Trevor Turner-Rice 2000 Porsche Boxster 40.608 0.235 1.704
8 1 P4 1 Barry Cogut 2010 Porsche Cayman S 40.791 0.183 1.887
9 4 NP-S 104 Charles Dodds 2001 Mazda Miata LS 40.931 0.140 2.027

Your driving style is "grip it and rip it." Very jerky.

Thanks for the vids. Tires seem to be doing a good job for you. I'll bet you could use their "noisemaking" property to pick up some time, especially in the 360.

Quick question. You stated that you can't (or shouldn't) mount them on 8" wheels. Can you explain that to me. I'm looking at a 225 set on some 7.5" 6UL's but want to make sure they are going to fit properly before spending the $$. I know I can put the RS3's on the 7.5".

Thank you

You "can" do everything you just posted.
According to the tire company and tire distributors, you "shouldn't"

These types of tires, "Extreme Performance Summer" as The Tire Rack refers to them all run very wide. "225", "205", whatever. These numbers are nominal. They aren't true. Secondly, these width numbers are referring to a tire's "section" width, which is always wider than a tire's "tread" width. Section widths are measured from sidewall to sidewall with the tire at operating pressure. That measurement will change with wheel width.

It is commonly accepted in the aftermarket, that:
195 fits very well on a 7.5
205 on an 8
225 on a 9

Of course there is some variance in there. Some ST autoX classes limit wheel width, so people have tested and found that certain 225 options work well enough on the skinnier wheels. Others have found a certain 195 to outperform the wider tires on the same wheel.

Emilio once wrote something along the lines of, "a radial tire delivers optimal lateral grip on a wheel width the same as its section width." I'm sure hes done his testing, and this idea can also be observed in nearly any form of racing. People run the widest wheels they are allowed to.

Some crazy Integra people run 275s on their stock class limited 6.5" wheels.
Some crazy stance kids run 165s on 9" wheels.
Lots of things "fit", "properly" depends on your intentions and application.


You can absolutely run 225s on 7.5". You might be sacrificing some steering feel, peak grip, contact patch, and might have irregular wear, but it will fit and work fine. Picking one tire or another might gain some of that back with the BFGs as they seem to be the stiffest shouldered 225 available, short of a Hoosier.

Most people reading this forum will think the 205s fit perfectly on the 8"s. Tire Rack and other major retailers don't want the risk associated with mounting a tire on a wheel wider than the manufacturer's recommendation, so they say.

/end tire sales guy rant.

Here's some data from a local STS driver, keep in mind he's car is nationally competitive. He's also a nationally competitive driver, lol.

205/50/15 Rival
195/50/15 R1R(shaved)

"Did my own BFG/Toyo test Sunday at our first local event. Heres the scoop..short and sweet..
59.546 58.461 58.759-BFG
57.719 57.542-Toyo
58.722 BFG and in that order.. first three runs on BFG then swap to Toyos..then back to BFG
am I doing it wrong??"

Another nationally competitive driver did some test n' tune runs at Dixie last weekend with the same tires. Results showed the same, the Rivals were about a second slower.

One could say the car isn't optimized for the BFGs, which is true. I don't think they could optimize out a full second, though.

195 R1R is still magic pixie dust tire, the only R1R to have the good compound all the way through down to the carcass.

I have room to improve, no doubt about it. This is what I was referring to earlier - I'm behind the car now, need more seat time to get a feel for what I can expect from it.

Between my last autox in October and this one I have changed:
spring/shocks from Tein Flex 9/6kg to XidaCS 700/400
suspension bushings from 130k stock rubber to poly
sway bars from FM front/stock NB sport rear to RB hollow front/MSM rear
tires from crappy worn out RS2's with no grip to BFG Rivals with lots more
oh and added about 10% more power

It's essentially a completely different car. I'm not used to it yet.

That's kind of surprising, keeping in mind 225 RS3 on a 7.5" wheel is slower than the 195 r1r on an autocross course. Didn't think it would be a 1 second difference. What is going to be interesting is the 225 Rival vs 225 RS3 on a 9" wheel.

Sometimes the grip it and rip it method isn't bad(expect the few times you have one hand the wheel while turning, that's a no-no) check out Strano at Dixie last weekend: Here's my miata's run for comparison of the course:
I'm very interested in the 225 on a 9 bfg vs rs3, as well.

Hmm...granted the first video is the faster, I look at the turn at 0:14 in both video's and yours is smooth and the other requires a correction. For a car running super stock class, the abrupt movements are a lot more forgiving than a car like Mobius', where the combo of abrupt movement and more power upset the car.

I hear the criticisms on hand position. Some of those corners are extremely tight. I would love to run a course as open as the one in post 32. I would be high in 3rd on that course if a 5speed stock power NA is bouncing off the rev limiter in 2nd.

No kidding! I watch videos online of :40 second courses and think wow that's a short course, but really it's just a super fast long course with 2 legitimate turns hahaha.

Yeah, those turns looked painfully tight, lol.

With your 4.3 and (I dunno what limiter) you'd probably between 2nd and 3rd. A FAST SSM miata had the wrong FD at Dixie, but he's 300+rwhp in a 4.1 and 5spd put him at the limiter(7800rpm) quite a bit in 2nd.



You do need to get on some bigger courses, they're a lot more fun!

Whose 4.3? Not mine. I'm 3.9 with a six speed. My 2nd is shorter (all my ratios are shorter) than a 5spd with a 4.1.

What pressure do you guys recommend for aggressive street usage?

I'd run mid to low 30's, even aggressive street driving isn't going to heat up a tire much. Heat comes from extreme braking and extreme acceleration. If you're doing a lot of that on the street, you're either stopped or going 120mph. Aim for 40psi +/- a couple psi when hot. 30 cold is going to feel a bit squishy and slightly gripper, with worse mileage. Get closer to 38 cold and its going to feel firmer, jumpier, slightly less grippy, and better mileage. Find your personal sweet spot somewhere in the middle.

I'd love to see the Rivals at a track day. Since they seem to be geared towards autox, I'd worry they'd over heat too quickly.

Yeah, they came from tire rack with 42psi and in my hurry to try them out, I forgot to lower the pressure. With a depowered rack the steering was very light/easy at that psi. Ride didn't seem to suffer any? After lowering them down to 30psi cold, the steering effort definitely increased but so did the grip:). Next time out I'll try 34 f/r. Think I'm gonna like them though.

89474 205/50ZR15 86 W BSW 200 AA A 5.5" - 7.5"

Tire rack won't mount them on a 8 because BFG says the max is 7.5. I'm 99% sure that's a recent reword, I'll check my catalogs at work tomorrow, but I think it used to say "recommended rim width" not min/max rim width.

Our fast and hard rule is we'll put a tire on a wheel 1" wider or narrower than recommended. No more.

I ran mine at 26psi cold at the autox. They never warmed up enough to be hot to the touch. With the sidewall as stiff as it is, and if you're running a 205 on an 8" rim, I don't think anything over 30 would be necessary. In for test results, though.

So, consensus is I should keep my 195 R1R's instead of buying a set of these?

Depends on what you want. If you're looking for the best cold/wet rain autox street tire, 195R1R is still the magic it seems. OTOH, the Rival will almost certainly wear much much better under track conditions.

^Yes, only in relation to STS autocross. When I jump to CSP, I'm poor, so locally I'll be running street tires as well it seems. (save teh purple crack for ProSolo's)

That's funny because TR sent me my 15x8 K1's mounted with 205 Rivals lol

talk to Rudy

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1368287849
https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1368287849

Whoa whoa whoa....I thought you could only 15x7's now?!?!

nope. kosei k1 version2.
15x8+35. I just got a set. :D

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1368557607

Guess I'm buying wheels soon....

yup.

search for NB Miata, SCCA STR class and there they are. a little on the heavier side for an 8

Long Term Update?
 

Any update after running them for a while?

I just read over at miata.net that these have stopped being produced until the spring?
I guess I'll have to put 225's on my 15x8"

Ran z2s at the track, 100 miles on track. Looks new, mild greasyness on a 85 degree day. Unsure of track temps. Happy with my decision

Speaking of the above, I have 185's on a 7", and if I were to do it again, it'd definitely be a 7.5".

Section width on them is 7.6".

Can't agree that 195 and 7.5 go together. Their section width is 8".

I've had 225's on 7", and it was like turning with using marshmallows.

I've been happy with them. As a highway tire, I took a 360 mile round trip up to Packwood a couple of months ago and have no complaints.

Today's autocross was wet. In the first run group I believe I was top time in my class. The second run group got 2 runs on an almost completely dry course before it dumped rain on them, so times came down drastically compared to the first run group, but comparing the after-rain runs for the second run group (which is easy to do when you're running the timing computer) my time was still competitive.

I'd do it again.

These tires are shit in the rain on a track. I was able to drive faster on cording ra1s in standing water than I was able to on full tread rivals. Not to mention(I'm sure möbius will chime in since it was his set that I was driving on) they are losing chunks of tread and had splitting across the tread all over.

Well, I just mounted a set of these (I think I got the last 205 set available from Phil's). Holy cow are they stickier than the half-worn 340 treadwear old-tech G-Force Sports I took off. This is really my first experience with this class of tire. Can't wait to get these on track.

My HPDE instructors were hating those old street tires. I got everything from niceties ("These tires are great teachers -- feels like you're driving in the rain") to brutal honesty ("These tires suck -- I hate them"). LOL.

OK, time to make fun of the track noob. ;)

Z2s perform much like the Z1s in the rain: M A G I C (for street summers).

Is there any part of the design of the "tread" on these tires that makes you think they will do any better than abysmal in standing water? The only thing they have going for them in this regard is a high silica compound. None of the grooves look like they're designed to evacuate water. This is very clearly a dry competition tire.

Wet tires tend to look like the Hoosier H20, with diagonal grooves for water evacuation and a deeper tread (9/32nd on the H20, vs 7 on the Rival).

Im aware that they aren't designed for serious wet use but I drove the rest of the day on cording ra1s with no tread at all and those performed better I would think a tire with at least some tread would be able to move a little more water than a bald ra1