Both the Cooper Zeon RS3 G1 and the Goodyear Eagle Sport All-Season, categorized as ultra-high performance AS tires, make excellent choices for individuals seeking to maximize their all-season performance. Engineered to deliver exceptional dry and wet traction, both these options excel, regardless of the weather conditions, including light snow. Let’s compare how these two perform side by side.
Main Highlights
So overall, the Cooper Zeon RS3 G1 is better at:
- Ride Quality: Offering superior impact comfort and noise dampening, thanks to its advanced tread design.
- Wet Performance: Excelling in wet conditions with effective siping and groove design for optimal water dispersion and grip.
- Winter Traction: Demonstrating better grip on icy and snowy surfaces due to its multi-directional siping and unique tread features.
Whereas the Goodyear Eagle Sport All-Season is better at:
- Linear Grip: Providing better traction and braking power due to its minimal tread features.
- Overall Handling: Achieving faster lap times in tests with a more effective steering response and better cornering efficiency.
- Dry Road Performance: Superior in terms of steering response and handling, owing to its reduced lug bending.
Tread Features
The Cooper Zeon RS3 G1 offers an innovative asymmetric tread pattern, featuring five distinct rib or block columns.
The central rib, the slimmest of the five, is uniquely designed with a combination of linear and curved sipes, and outward-facing biters.
Flanking this rib, the adjacent ribs display notable differences.
Here, one side presents S-shaped blocks with linear sipes and notches, while the opposite side features C-shaped blocks with outward-facing notches.
These ribs are connected to the outer circumferential grooves by well-defined lateral voids.
Moving towards the tire’s shoulders, the design diverges further with varying lug sizes and patterns.
One shoulder exhibits larger, simpler lugs, in contrast to the other shoulder’s denser design with linear sipes and interlocking lateral voids, enhancing traction and stability.
Speaking of the tire’s internal structure, it comprises a robust two-ply polyester casing, reinforced with high-stiffness bead fillers, dual steel belts, and a spirally wound, single-ply nylon wrap for added durability.
Moving towards the Goodyear’s tire, the Eagle Sport AS also comes with a similarly designed asymmetric 5-rib tread pattern.
Here, the central three ribs, forming four circumferential grooves, share a uniform linear siping pattern.
Among these ribs, two feature slanted in-groove biters, while the third has small notches at the end of its sipes.
The shoulder lugs are bulkier than the central area but remain tightly packed, each linked by an adjacent rib and featuring curved siping that merges into longitudinal slits.
The tire’s internal construction includes a two-ply polyester casing with dual steel belts and a top layer of spirally wrapped polyamide.
Side Note: Its polyester casing employs RaceWrap technology, angling the plies to significantly enhance the tire’s handling capabilities.
Info on Sizes
The Cooper Zeon RS3 G1 comes in 16 to 20 inches rims, with following specs.
- Speed ratings: W and Y.
- Load ratings: SL and XL.
- Tread depth: 10.5/32″ (with 2 sizes also seen with 10/32″ only).
- Weight: 22 to 35 lbs, (with 205/55R16 being the lightest, and 275/40R20, the heaviest).
- UTQG: 500 AA A.
- Treadwear warranty: 45k miles.
Review this tire here: https://tiredriver.com/cooper-zeon-rs3-g1-review/
The Goodyear Eagle Sport All-Season is currently coming with 15 to 22 inches wheels, and they have the following specs.
- Speed ratings: H, V and W.
- Load ratings: SL and XL.
- Tread depth: 9 to 11/32″.
- Weight range: 17 to 40 lbs.
- Treadwear warranty: 50k miles.
- UTQG rating: 560 A A.
Review this tire here: https://tiredriver.com/goodyear-eagle-sport-all-season-review/
Dry-Road Performance
The comprehensive evaluation of the tire’s traction and steering response hinges on its dry performance. We need to investigate each of these aspects on their own.
Linear Grip
When it comes to linear grip (which is the tire’s traction, when its moving straight ahead), it largely depends on the tread’s central region.
So, why is the center so key? It’s pretty “straightforward”. This part carries the most of the weight concentration, when you’re driving straight.
That’s why you often see all season tires with solid running ribs or denser lugs in the middle, while the sides are a bit different.
Side Note: You can find all of these all-season tires here: https://tiredriver.com/all-season-tires/
Now, here comparatively, the Cooper Zeon RS3 G1 doesn’t quite hit the mark.
This is because, it comes with a narrower central rib (as I discussed talking about its tread design above). This means the tire is not making much contact with the road as you’d want.
In contrast, the Goodyear Eagle Sport All-Season has a different approach. It’s got three continuous ribs right in the center and keeps the tread features to a minimum. This design allows for better and more consistent contact with the road, which translates to superior braking power.
The difference between these two tires? It’s subtle, but significant. We’re talking less than half a foot difference on average in braking tests from 60 mph to a standstill.
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Click here to see our channelCornering efficiency is primarily attributed to the tire’s shoulders, as they’re in maximum contact with the road during turns.
This relationship is attributed to centripetal force. (That’s why you get the sensation of being pushed to the opposite side of a turning car.)
Now, here, the Cooper Zeon RS3 G1 with its chunky wide shoulder lugs provide you with superior lateral traction. But overall dry handling is still better on Goodyear’s tire, as it comes out with a second faster on averaged lap times on tests.
So why is that? Well this has to do with the tire’s more effective steering response.
Relatively speaking, the Eagle Sport AS features a shallower tread depth, with a stiffer rubber composition, and all lugs sitting on a yet even more rigid secondary rubber layer. All of these design elements keep the lugs form bending too much.
This bending of the lugs basically takes time to recover (tread returning to original shape), and that adds to its overall handling times.
Moreover, since the tire also provides you with better on-center feel, and braking, it enters and exits the corners faster too, adding to its overall lap times on handling tests.
For Your Info: On-center is all about how snappy the tire gets back to business after a turn. A good one does this quick, making for a smooth exit. A not-so-good one? Might leave you with some wheel slippage as you try to speed up, (accelerate after the turn).
Ride Quality
Ride quality is two parts, tire’s bumps and noise dampening abilities. Let’s discuss both one by one.
Vibrations Comfort
When it comes to impact comfort, the Cooper Zeon RS3 G1 ends up with one of the better scores, through my subjective evaluations.
The tire offers a pretty decent performance, where not only are large impacts softer than the others in its category, smaller bumps and imperfections are also better damped and absorbed.
On the other side, the Goodyear Eagle Sport All-Season also isn’t so bad, but it offers a relatively stiffer ride, though it also gives it that sporty flavor through turns as well as the stability.
For this tire while its initial hit seems a little tauter relatively, it does an good enough job of cushioning the final bit of travel which really helped gives it a polished feel.
For Your Info: The Zeon G1 is in-fact on of the best (when it comes to impact comfort), in all other top ultra high performance all season tires.
Noise Dampening
The tread design of a tire plays a pivotal role in the amount of noise it generates during motion, primarily stemming from air particles colliding with the tire’s surface.
This air usually infiltrates the tread via shoulder voids (for the most part), and upon impact, these particles generate noise which then reverberates within the tread grooves, leading to what’s known as in-groove resonance.
Having said that, Cooper RS3 takes the lead here, providing you with lower decibel readings on tests.
It’s tread pattern more sophisticated in comparison, especially when it comes to generating variable pitching tones.
The tire’s tread is basically altered in a way, that air particles hitting different areas, could generated various tones, and frequencies.
Those frequencies, then try to cancel out each other, reducing in-groove resonance.
Wet Performance
When it comes to performing on wet roads, its all in the grooves and sipes of the tread pattern, as these elements tell you about the tire’s water clearing abilities.
Grooves are the big players in getting rid of water. They act like highways, channeling water away.
While sipes, those smaller cuts, are more about mopping up what’s left (out by grooves), kind of like a sponge clearing the path for the tire to grip the road.
With this in mind, it’s no surprise that the Cooper Zeon RS3 G1 is a bit of a star in wet conditions. It offers great grip and feels really stable and reliable, letting you know just how much grip you’ve got.
Why’s it so good?
Well, it’s down to its siping design.
I mean, the sipes on this tire vary in angle in a well engineered manner, providing you the grip from all directions.
Plus, its (circumferential) grooves are interconnected really well, making for top-notch water dispersion and reducing the risk of aquaplaning.
So these grooves, (which are more effective in taking water out), not only provide you with superior resistance to hydroplaning in comparison here, but also boost the tire’s overall wet grip, as more water going out through grooves, leave less for sipes to handle.
On the other side, the Eagle Sport All Season although provides you with ample grip, where in fact its wet braking is on par with the Cooper’s, it lacks in the steering responsiveness department, where the tire is prone to understeering.
This is mainly due to more closed up longitudinally aligned ribs, not allowing water to flow out laterally.
Though keep in mind, the overall difference in their wet performance is not a lot. And one can easily outperform another, considering these factors.
Winter Traction
When we’re talking about how well tires do in winter, it’s key to look at a few things:
- How they grip on various terrain types, like snow and ice?
- How much traction they offer?
- How stable they feel?
Now, both of these tires here, without the 3 Peak Mountain Snowflake badge aren’t exactly show-stoppers, but the Cooper Zeon RS3 G1 is a bit of a champ that actually does better than you’d think.
I mean on tests, it did much better than I expected it to perform.
This is all down to its well engineered design, where it features multi-directional siping, and unique in-groove notches, thanks to its C and S shaped blocks, which also have chamfered edges.
All these tread features provide relatively better grip on icy and snowy surfaces.
On the flip side, the Goodyear Eagle Sport All-Season falls a bit short. Where it really loses points is in its side grip and how it feels when you steer.
The main issue? Its rubber is on the stiffer side, and it just gets harder when it’s cold, which means less flexibility and grip, relatively speaking.
Plus it also doesn’t have the highly needed in-groove biters, which Cooper offers.
These are pretty important as they pick up snow particles, lodging them in, providing snow to snow contact. And this contact brings-in more friction, as snow particles stick more to each other, compared to tread’s rubber.
So, What’s the Verdict?
Now, in the end, both tires have a lot of varying results, across different performance areas.
Goodyear Eagle takes the lead in terms of linear grip, handling, and steering response due to its design features like continuous central ribs.
However, its counterpart leads in ride quality, offering superior impact comfort and noise dampening, on dry roads.
In wet conditions, the Cooper’s tire has the upper hand, and yes, it also takes the lead in winter performance, overall.
Other than that, the Goodyear tire’s stiffer rubber composition allows it to provide superior resistance to wear. Though both tires have similar fuel economy.
