Dunlop Direzza ZII - Experience? Reviews?

fzgood

I haven't seen a wealth of information on this tire on this forum. I picked these up and I'll come back here to describe my experience with them once I do a couple spirited drives post-break in.


For the record, my first choice was RE-11's, but I was having trouble finding them in 275/35/19 for my stock rears.


In the meantime, I figured it'd be nice to have a thread for people to share detailed experience with this tire, maybe color my expectations a bit.


From the reviews on tirerack.com I'm expecting turn-in to be more responsive than with RE-050's, a grippier handling experience, and I'm praying that the road noise will be bearable. Oh, and I suppose I expect to get more miles out of these... I got about 13,500k out of the stock tires... no track days... call me undisciplined...

I don't explore the limits of grip, or autox/track, but I do drive exuberantly on twisty roads quite frequently. Hopefully the ZII's were a good choice.


Update @ 100 miles:
I've definitely noticed more pronounced road noise than was on OEM. I'm not sure that I find the road noise itself annoying more so than the fact that it's there. It makes me rev harder to drown it out which might be a bad thing. There's also more sensitivity toward the road surface—for example, I can feel through the steering wheel when my tires run onto the strip of paint indicating a bike lane. I like it. Even before trying to explore some of the grip and response qualities you can feel the sidewall is firm compared to the OEM tires.

So far the, balance of qualities and civility are trades I'd happily make when presented with the OEM alternative. If the grip is as much of an improvement as other people have posted about and online reviews indicate, I think I'll be quite happy.