Conquering every season with ease, the BF Goodrich g Grip All Season 2 stands out in the realm of premium touring category, particularly for its superb snow handling. Let’s check out this tire in greater details.
Table of Contents
Key Highlights
Overall, the BF Goodrich g-Grip All Season 2 showcases notable strengths, particularly in:
- Superior hydroplaning resistance, thanks to its well-designed grooves.
- Outstanding noise comfort, standing out as one of the quietest in its grand touring all-season category.
- Excellent winter performance, with a thermally adaptive rubber composition.
Yet, there’s room for improvement in certain areas, notably in:
- Longitudinal traction and braking in dry conditions, as its heavier weight and tread design hinder its stopping power and agility.
- Lateral grip and handling, with its substantially voided shoulder blocks.
- Tread longevity and fuel efficiency, where its weight, tread design, and rubber composition lead to faster wear and increased rolling resistance.
Offered Sizes
The tire comes in 14″ rims only, with following specs.
- Speed ratings: T, H and V.
- Load ratings: SL, and XL.
- Tread depth: 10/32″ on all.
- Weight: 22 to 30 lbs.
- UTQG: 500 A A.
- Treadwear warranty: None.
Tread Structure
Comprehending the tire’s overall effectiveness requires a focused analysis of the tread pattern, so its best, we start here.
So, the BF Goodrich g-Grip All Season 2 features a directional tread pattern with V-shaped lugs segmented into four distinct parts by circumferential grooves.
Side Note: There are a few things, you’d might like to now about directional tires: https://tiredriver.com/how-to-tell-if-tires-are-directional/
Each block column is carefully crafted with siping, that varies in depth and orientation, enhancing grip across various driving conditions.
Starting with the outer ribs, the lugs here have prominent longitudinal notches. (Note how they don’t cut through the lugs all the way, meaning they don’t interconnect the lateral grooves together).
And besides these notches, these lugs are characterized by thick linear siping slits.
Moving towards the middle, the lugs are very crowded here.
They interlock with each other, and form greater rubber to road contact, relatively, providing stability and aid in maintaining straight-line performance.
This not only goes for dry roads, but also wet, as you also get a lot more sipes here too. I’ll explain it more in its respective section.
Feeling lost in all-season tire options? Let’s narrow it down, start here:
https://tiredriver.com/all-season-tires/
Dry Performance
In the realm of dry performance, it’s essential to evaluate both the tire’s traction on dry surfaces and its ability to respond swiftly to steering changes.
Here the overall traction of a tire is further divided into longitudinal and lateral grip.
Let me explain them all one by one.
Longitudinal Traction
This traction measures a tire’s ability to maintain grip while moving linearly. And it gets influenced by aspects like tread composition and design, particularly the central section of the tire’s contact area.
Moreover, it’s often assessed through the tire’s effectiveness in braking.
In this context, the BF Goodrich g-Grip All Season 2 falls very short compared to other all-season tires in its category. For instance, it lags over 10 feet behind the cheap and budget-friendly Nexen N Blue 4 Seasons (review), on braking distance tests.
So what’s causing this? Well, one contributing factor is its weight; a heavier tire is less agile and requires more effort to decelerate due to greater momentum.
Moreover, the tire’s tread pattern also presents opportunities for improvement, where although the tire offers interlocking lugs in the middle, they push on to each other, while the tire brakes (harshly).
This happens because these lugs are missing with chamfered edges, hindering tire’s overall braking performance, and on-center feel/stability.
Overall Handling
Navigating through corners causes a noticeable shift of a tire’s weight towards its sides, away from the center. And this shift allows the shoulder tread blocks, or ribs, to engage more strongly with the road surface.
That’s why their overall contact patch, along with flexibility/stability matters a lot here.
In this regard, the BFG g-Grip All Season 2 requires improvement. Its design, characterized by substantially voided shoulder blocks, weakens its lateral traction.
Basically, the tire features prominently voided shoulder lugs combined with a softer, winter-focused rubber composition, making these lugs susceptible to bending during cornering.
Additionally, the tire’s considerable weight exacerbates this issue. As the lugs bear increased pressure while rubbing against the road, they tend to bend more.
This flexing primarily causes the delay in translating steering inputs to feedback from the wheels.
That’s why in my comparative analysis with the Goodyear Vector 4Seasons (review), the BF Goodrich tire falls behind by over 4 seconds, in handling lap time tests, on average.
Wet Performance
In wet conditions, tire grooves are essential for diverting most of the water. However, some water particles still remain behind, and they come underneath the lugs, causing slippage.
So for clearing them, tires employ sipes. These are small slits on tread which act as miniature channels.
Basically, the water particles stressed between the tread and the road, are squeezed into those slits, which later spray them out, as the tire rolls over.
That’s why it makes sense why tires offering better overall wet traction come with sufficient no. of sipes and a flexible rubber composition.
Now, this is where BFG falls short. The tire although offers good enough sipes, their linear arrangement reduces their overall effectiveness.
With such linear structures, basically these sipes tend to get stiffer (especially when the tire maneuvers aggressively), losing their flexible and with it, their water absorbing abilities.
That’s why in my comparative wet lap-time tests, the G Grip AS2 lacked a lot, lagging 3 seconds behind the Vredestein Quatrac Pro (which is one of the best rated tires, when it comes to wet traction).
Though on a positive note, the tire does great in terms of hydroplaning resistance, which has to do with tire’s water clearance abilities through grooves.
And this tire featuring proper voided V shaped channels expel water out quickly enough, allowing for superb float speeds (which tell how fast a tire can move over a few mm of water covered tracks).
For Your Info: The mentioned Quatrac Pro is so impressive in overall wet performance, that I had to pick it for my list of top grand touring AS tires. Check out the list here: https://tiredriver.com/best-grand-touring-all-season-tires/
Tread Life and Fuel Economy
Tread longevity and fuel economy are both influenced by a lot of common factors such as a tire’s overall weight, rubber composition, and tread design.
And considering all of these it can be seen, why the BF Goodrich tire here, faces some challenges.
Here, the tire’s greater weight is a significant concern. Although its available only for 14-inch rims, it weighs up to 30 lbs. Additionally, its rubber compound is overly soft and sticky, and the tread design includes numerous voids.
The heavier weight, combined with more voided lugs, means that the weight is distributed over a smaller rubber area.
Each lug, therefore, bears a greater weight pressure on itself.
This increased pressure against the road surface negatively impacts tread longevity and fuel economy due to higher rolling resistance.
Furthermore, the lugs’ softer rubber composition makes them prone to bending, a situation worsened by the tire’s weight.
This bending of the lugs leads to energy wastage, as energy is not conserved, and gets expended in the form of heat and in reshaping the lugs.
As a result, the tire typically doesn’t last beyond 30,000 miles and doesn’t offer optimal fuel economy. This is due to the combined effects of its weight, tread design, and rubber composition.
Though you can improve the tire’s tread life, by following this guide: https://tiredriver.com/how-to-increase-tread-life-on-tires/
Snow Traction
The BF Goodrich g-Grip All Season 2 excels in all types of winter conditions.
And its overall winter effectiveness can be attributed to three key factors:
- Its rubber composition.
- It’s winter-optimized sipes.
- And its directional tread pattern.
Firstly, the tire features a thermally adaptive rubber compound, designed to stay flexible in cold temperatures. This flexibility is crucial for maintaining grip in winter conditions.
Secondly, the sipes, which although lack in providing adequate wet traction, provide effective snow handling. These sipes, a long with longitudinal notches and in-groove biters, create and maintain snow-to-snow contact, provide superb overall traction.
(This type of contact is essential since snow adheres better to itself than to rubber).
Moreover, thanks to the tire’s V shaped lugs, its designed to expel snow efficiently, aiding in acceleration by channeling the snow outwards and backwards, thus promoting forward motion.
That’s why the tire also comes with 3 peak mountain snowflake rating (which tells that the tire is at least 10% better in light snow acceleration, compared to standard touring all season tires, on average).
Nonetheless, the BFG has some limitations here as well, where, with lack of sufficient biters in its tread, it can’t offer impressive enough ice traction, even though it rocks on soft snowy terrains.
Overall Ride Comfort
Ride quality can be assessed by two factors: the amount of noise a tire produces on the road, and its ability to smooth out surface irregularities.
Let’s take a look at both one by one.
Noise Comfort
Tire noise largely stems from the way air interacts with the tire structure. As air particles flow through the gaps in the shoulders and collide with the tread walls, they create various types of pattern noise and tread vibrations.
With this understanding, it’s often expected that tires with directional patterns having voided shoulders would be noisier.
However, the BF Goodrich g-Grip All Season 2 defies this, standing out as one of the quietest all-season tires in its category.
A key feature contributing to its low noise levels are its well engineered shoulder voids. They are made in a way, that air particles entering and hitting them could generate a range of tones, with varying frequencies.
These varying tones then try to cancel out each other, minimizing in-groove resonance.
Road Smoothness
The BF Goodrich g-Grip All Season 2 offers a well cushioned ride, primarily due to its softer, winter-focused rubber compound, designed to stay flexible even in freezing temperatures.
Though there are a few things you should know here.
Now, according to my subjective ride-comfort evaluations, the tire provides one of the softest rides compared to other tires in its category, where it effectively smoothens the rough edges of impacts, contributing to a comfortable driving experience. But the thing is, the tire is overly soft, and this causes some issues here.
I mean, due to its overly soft rubber composition, it takes longer to dampen the effects of larger bumps.
To be more specific, while the tire performs well with small impacts, making them less noticeable, it struggles somewhat with larger hits.
So overall its performance needs to be a little fine-tuned for a more balanced response to various road conditions.
Final Assessment
The final assessment reveals a range of performance levels for this tire, which should be matched against your personal driving demands and situations.
So, the BFG All Season 2, provides you with superb overall performance when it come to winter traction, where it excels on both icy and snowy terrains.
Though the tire really falls short in dry and wet conditions, where the weakest aspect of its performance is its ineffective braking.
However, it does perform well in hydroplaning resistance.
Additionally, the tire’s weight and tread design lead to faster wear and reduced fuel efficiency.
And lastly, in terms of comfort, despite being one of the quietest tires in its category, the overly soft rubber composition affects its ability to handle larger impacts smoothly.
