I recently put some of these tires on an '01 M6, and while the tires are MUCH quieter, the car does not track straight. I've worked with Firestone to try 5 different front tires, and while the initial tire pull is gone, the car still drifts to the right at freeway speed...ALWAYS! I even have a 1.5 degree spilt on the caster (more than the typical .5 - 1 degree spilt often used for road crown). Interestingly, when the local dealer swapped all four wheels with wheels that were fitted with stock EMT Goodyears the car ran straight! Anyone else have this problem? Or, better yet, anyone else have any ideas as to whether these tires could very well be subject to "roll" more than the next tire brand in its class?

TIA

 

Yes i had firestones and they tracked like no other
but its normal for a directinal tire design
My nittos that had a simular tread also tracked
NO BIGGIE

 

Thanks for the reply, but I'm not sure I understand...

In not so many words, I mentioned that the Firestones don't go straight. Is that what you mean?

The stock Goodyears are also uni-directional, yet they go straight, right?

Thanks again.

 

my firestones go straight...all 10 of them that have been on this car have. dang, 10 tires in < 20k miles. that seems like a lot. hahaha ok, 4 of them just got put on about 1k miles ago or less so i guess i went through 6 in <20k miles...thats better...somewhat....

 

Hib Halverson did a write-up on EMT's. I had considered other tires for my next set due to the noise issues with the Goodyears. After reading his article, I am not so sure and will likely replace my tires with stock Goodyear or the C6 version if there is an improvement and they are available.

I had Firestones on my C4 and liked them very much. Others did have problems as you state on the C4 version as well. Makes you wonder about their quality control.

 

Been running them here for a year or so with zero problems.

 

I have Firestone Firehawks on the front only and Goodyear EMT still on the rear. Have had no problems with tracking. I intend to replace the rears with Firehawks by September. Hope this helps.

 

My Firehawks track straight all the time

 

Wow! Are you a real aggressive driver? I hope I get more than that out of mine.

 

I have a set of the Firehawks that I run during the winter months. They seem to run nice and straight. There will be occasions when they tend to follow the road a bit, but for the most part, they track correctly.

 

Mine too!!!

 

I think you're right with the comment on quality control. In fact, all 5 tires I tried for the front were manufactured at different times in '03 and '04, and out of all of them a combination of only a select pair of those makes the front "liveable", which is still not what they should be, in my opinion.

I was at the tire shop again today, 5th time in two weeks. This time we swapped the back tires (removing them from the rim, of course) for a tire drift, I suspected was coming from the rear. Sure enough, even though the store couldn't believe a pull could come from rear tires, swapping left to right made a definite difference, even with uni-directional tires. We also reset rear toe to try and compensate for the drift, and now it's almost "the way it should be", which is NOT how tires should be, you know what I mean?

The stock tires are WAY too harsh and noisy. Every new and used C5 I drove with those tires on them were very loud. So loud in a coupe that I almost settled for a convertible, because it seemed that the soft top seemed to absorb the road noise rather than just bounce it off the coupe's interior. No offense to topless owners, but I don't like convertible vettes because the weather where I am only affords top-down driving for 3 months out of the year, and I don't like how the tops wear. Especially around the corners where the rear corners of the windows fray the tops.

OK, now back to the topic. Sorry about the tangent, I guess my ritalin is wearing off! :-) My experience with the Firehawks has me willing to try the Michelin Pilot AS Zero Pressures. Although they're probably a less aggressive tire, right now there aren't many choices in run-flats for C5s. While Goodyear makes the best tire in the Eagle F1 GS-D3, they're not run-flats. Much better than any other Goodyear including the C5's stock EMT's, or any other tire I've had on any car for that matter. I ran them on my C4, and they were unbeatable for handling and ride comfort, even in the rain, regardless of what some reviewers said about wet weather. If there was a way to get a donut spare setup for my car, I would run those tires in a heartbeat.

 

I have found that drift in a car is caused by caster adjustment not camber. Camber is what re-centers the steering and wheels to a straight line after turning. Caster adjustment moves one tire (or both for that matter) forward or rearward with respect to the spindle center line from one side of the car to the other.

A good alignment tech will know which way to move the front tires (fore or aft) to reduce your drift. I had this problem for a long time with a previous car (GTA Trans Am) and Pontiac always said there was no way to make a caster adjustment (in a strut system...they were wrong). Most techs don't know what effect caster has on the overall alignment, so they usually don't touch it (cause when they do, they have to readjust the camber).

By the way, I have run both Goodyear EMTs and the Firestone runflats without problems (once the alignment was done right, i.e. caster).

Sidebar (joke): Drift - a well controlled power slide!

 

I just re-read my post and I meant caster, not camber. I corrected the original post. Sorry, my bad! :-)