Tire review - Falken FK452

Cars tested with these tires:
- Honda S2000 AP1 Mk2 06/2004 240ps

Tests performed:
- I went through 1 set's of these.

Dry grip:
- It's a good tire. The compound has an excellent grip. It will grip better while hot, but the cold grip is still better than most of it's competitors hot.

Wet grip:
- Good grip. Not as good as dry grip, but still very composed.
- The wet cornering is good, but the bridgestone Re050a eclipses it easily

Aquaplaning resistance:
- Very Good. Excellent handling of water and feed back of what's doing. Probably the closest thing to the Potenza S02 I've driven yet.

Progressiveness:
- Very good in the dry, honest but abrutp in the wet.
- The dry let-go is very composed and let's enjoy slides in safety and control. Probably not as efficient as the Potenza Re050A, but a lot more fun to fool around.
- The wet let go is honest, however the grip-to-drift transition is too rougth and scares you the first couple of times it happen... once drifting, it will show you a sweet spot that you'll find difficult to explore with most tires. Its the tire to test a chassis nature. Very good and responsive.

Integrity maintenance:
- It's brilliant. You can abuse it all you want and it will wear evenly and with all it's parts.
- Unlike most Falkens, it's quality rubber all the way to the metal threads. No plastic, no shity quality stuff, just good rubber.

Compound:
- It's a soft rubber compound with some silica and carbon in it. Decent wear resistance. The price tag clearly makes you consider 2 sets of these over 1 set of bridgestones.

Longevity:
- Decent. I've switched from Bridgestone to Falken and Toyo because of the price. I can use a set of Bridgestones for 30.000Km, or spend the same amount of money in 2 sets of Falken or Toyo and do 20.000Km each. That's the ONLY reason.

Coherence:
- The tires side-walls are very good. The tire can go through hard bends keeping the contact patch all the way through.
- It handles heavy cornering under acceleration very well and the drift grip is better than the Bridgestone's
- The compound is also very stable and even if you decide to run a mountain pass the entire day long, they will wear, they will get hot, but no grease will sweat out of it... it will grip all the way up the temperature range.

Balance:
-  THE only problem with them. Abuse and you'll feel vibration afterwards, making you go to the tire shop for balancing every now and then.
These tires require maintenance. Poorly balanced from factory.

Load Behaviour:
- Good load behaviour.
- The tire will endure heavy and powerful cars without a sweat...and will probably need less maintenance.

UPDATE:
Some pictures of the tires with over 20.000km of pure abuse. It's clear that the rubber is good stuff all the way.