Goodyear Eagle Exhilarate and the Eagle Sport All Season are both categorized as Ultra High Performance All-Season tires, specially designed for sports cars, sporty coupes, and performance sedans. These tires are finely tuned to offer exceptional handling and braking capabilities in wet, dry, and snowy conditions. But which one excels more? Let’s investigate!
Table of Contents
Main Highlights
So overall, the Goodyear Eagle Exhilarate is better at:
- Dry Handling: Providing superior lateral traction and stability.
- Wet Handling and Hydroplaning Resistance: With denser siping and interconnected grooves that improve water expulsion.
- Wear Resistance and Fuel Economy: Offering lighter build and optimized tread pattern.
Whereas the Goodyear Eagle Sport All Season is better at:
- Dry Braking: With more rubber contact on the road and efficient braking capabilities.
- Wet Braking: With its well optimized central ribs.
- Winter Performance: Providing slightly better snow and ice traction.
Tread Features
Let’s break down the Eagle Sport AS tire. It’s got this cool asymmetric tread with a 5 rib pattern.
Here, the middle three ribs work together to form four circumferential grooves.
Now all these ribs showcase a distinctive design.
The middle most rib has more laterally arranged linear sipes, and a fewer notches.
While the surrounding ribs? Well, one of them come with V shaped sipes, while the other has fewer sipes, and more of those notches, which are also a tad bit more aggressive.
The shoulder lugs on each side of the tire are world apart, yet they vary only slightly, as you can see.
One of them features notches, wave-like longitudinal siping, and a continuous running rib design.
While other carry ridges b/w the shoulder blocks.
But yes, both have similar laterally arranges sipes and grooves.
Now, switching gears to the Goodyear Exhilarate, it also sports an asymmetric tread, with five distinct ribs, or block columns.
Let’s zoom in on the two outer shoulder ribs.
Now, you must have noticed, that even though the tire’s asymmetric, these (shoulder) ribs look pretty similar.
Each rib features lugs with straight slits and angled longitudinal sipes.
And yes, they also form similar lateral voids, or grooves, dividing up the blocks.
Moving towards the center, the very middle rib is unique, marked by lateral notches that fan out to both sides.
These notches link up together with sipes, forming a square-shaped pattern (of slits).
Moving outwards, the ribs next to this central one are quite different from each other.
One mimics the central rib’s style, while the other, with fewer sipes, still follows a similar pattern, including less aggressive/smaller notches angling towards the shoulders.
Info on Sizes
The Goodyear Eagle Exhilarate comes in 17 to 22 inches rims. And these sizes have following specs.
- Speed ratings: W and Y.
- Load ratings: SL and XL.
- Tread depth: 10/32″.
- Weight: 20 to 34 lbs.
- UTQG: 500 AA A.
- Treadwear warranty: 45k miles.
- Internal construction: Two-ply polyester cord casing, twin steel belts, and two polyamide cap plies.
Review this tire in greater details: https://tiredriver.com/goodyear-eagle-exhilarate-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: 10 to 11/32″.
- Weight range: 17 to 40 lbs.
- Treadwear warranty: 50k miles.
- UTQG rating: 560 A A.
- Internally, the tire comes with 2 ply polyester, 2 steel belts, and a “single” spirally wrapped polyamide cap ply.
Review this tire here: https://tiredriver.com/goodyear-eagle-sport-all-season-review/
Dry-Road Performance
The tire’s traction and steering response are best understood by examining dry performance. We should assess each of these factors individually for a comprehensive analysis.
Linear Grip
The efficiency of a tire’s directional grip is demonstrated by its stopping distances.
And this grip comes down to a few things: what the tread’s made of, how much rubber actually touches the road (especially in the middle part), the tire’s weight, and its rolling resistance.
Now, given these factors, the Eagle Sport All Season is excelling here, as indicated by its shorter braking distances on my averaged test results.
Why? Well, because it has more rubber in contact with the road compared to its counterpart.
The Goodyear Exhilarate basically has more tread elements that reduce its effective contact patch, whereas the Eagle Sport on the other hand, has three continuous ribs in the center.
These ribs offers the tire with a more stable and consistent grip, leading to quicker stops and a better feel when driving straight.
Overall Handling
Overall handling is a mix of lateral traction and steering responsiveness.
Speaking of lateral grip first, its mostly about the tire’s shoulders and sidewalls. Here’s why: when you take a turn, the car’s weight leans to the opposite side. This puts more pressure on the tire’s shoulders, making them the main point of contact because of inertia.
Now, here, with Goodyear Exhilarate providing you with less voided shoulder lugs, and a combination of lateral and longitudinal slits (acting as biters), its understandable, why the tire excels in terms of lateral traction.
Plus, it balances understeer and oversteer really well, thanks to sturdy foundations under the lugs and a tougher rubber mix. That’s why it’s a better pick here, for overall handling, as well.
On the other side, the Goodyear Eagle Sport All-Season, falls short, mainly due to its increased weight and deeper tread depth leading to sluggish response to steering commands.
This design means the lugs can bend more and take longer to snap back, causing a lag between your steering and the tire’s reaction.
You can learn more on it here: https://tiredriver.com/are-all-season-tires-good-for-summer/
Fuel Efficiency
Fuel efficiency is directly linked to the rolling resistance of a tire.
Essentially, the more grip a tire has, the higher the friction it encounters, influenced by factors like the tire’s weight and the composition of the rubber.
And here, out of the two, the Goodyear Eagle Exhilarate shows a slight advantage. This edge comes from two main aspects of its design:
- A lighter construction.
- A stiffer rubber composition.
These characteristics basically, prevent excessive bending of the tire’s lugs, thus minimizing wastage of the energy in the form of heat, and reshaping of the lugs, resulting in a better fuel economy overall.
Though being UHP, you still can’t expect too much from these tires. Side note, out of all other all-season categories I’ve reviewed, standard touring tires are the most fuel efficient out there.
Wet-Road Performance
In wet conditions, a tire’s ability to perform well mainly hinges on how effectively it can remove water from its tread. And this is where grooves and sipes come into play.
Grooves are crucial for shifting most of the water away, but sipes, although may seem like mere slits, play a vital role in grip.
They work on a micro level, expanding and contracting to create a vacuum that sucks in water, thus enhancing wet traction.
This means that an optimal tire for wet traction should have more sipes, and flexibility to allow those sipes to function effectively.
Now, when we look at the results, it’s a bit of a mix.
Although the Eagle Sport All Season shows better wet braking and linear traction, it doesn’t match up to the Goodyear Exhilarate in overall wet handling, as evidenced by compared average lap test times.
This is because the Exhilarate has a superior design, featuring denser siping and a mix of wider and narrower slits that run in various directions, providing better grip from all angles.
Additionally, while both tires have four circumferential grooves, the tire’s design cleverly interconnects these grooves.
This design leads to more effective water expulsion from the grooves, reducing the reliance on sipes, further enhancing overall wet traction.
And yes, with more water going out through grooves, the tire also features better resistance to hydroplaning, another important factor in overall wet performance.
Ride Smoothness
Ride smoothness in tires is all about how well they can double as a secondary suspension, cushioning the impact of road irregularities. This quality is greatly influenced by the tire’s internal and external construction.
Now although both tires are pretty firm inside out, the ride was slightly well cushioned on Goodyear Eagle Exhilarate, as my test results indicate.
I mean, despite its overall firmness, the Exhilarate is quite effective at minimizing the feel of small road imperfections, making them less noticeable to the driver.
And sure when encountering larger bumps, the tire feels a bit under-damped, it still manages better control over these impacts compared to the Eagle Sport.
This superior performance can be attributed to its dual ply polyamide cap plies.
These layers provide additional space for absorbing and settling bumps, as opposed to the Sport All Season’s single nylon cap ply, which offers less buffer against road imperfections.
For Your Info: Out of all the top-notch ultra-high performance AS tires, the General G MAX 07 comes on top, in terms of impact comfort performance.
Review the tire here: https://tiredriver.com/general-g-max-as-07-review/
Winter Traction
All-season tires are usually pretty decent in winter conditions, especially when you’re looking at key aspects like steering, braking, and accelerating on snow and ice.
However, when testing out these boys here, you see a noticeable drop in overall performance in winter scenarios, particularly in steering response on ice.
Though still out of both options here, the Goodyear Eagle Exhilarate falls a bit shorter, as it gets relatively lower winter scores across my various tests.
So what’s going on here?
Well, the main problem with the Exhilarate is its relatively stiff rubber composition, which lessens the effectiveness of the tire’s biting edges.
In other words, the tire’s rubber doesn’t adapt well thermally, in colder temperatures, becoming more rigid, which means it doesn’t bite into the snow and ice as effectively as it should.
On the flip side, the Eagle Sport AS, despite having less aggressive notches and siping, actually performs better. This is partly due to its greater weight and slightly narrower section width.
These design characteristics basically allow the tire to exert more pressure on the snow, capturing and holding onto the snow particles. And that creates optimized snow-to-snow contact, which is essential because snow sticks better to itself than to rubber.
Though keep in mind, that interestingly, these same design elements that help in snow also make the tire less responsive in steering on dry roads.
Wear Resistance
Alright, so when you’re comparing these two tires in terms of wear resistance, they’re pretty much neck and neck in performance.
But, if you really have to choose, here’s the deal: the Goodyear Eagle Exhilarate edges out a bit in terms of results, especially in certain sizes.
Why? Well it all comes down to the tire’s lighter build and a tread pattern that’s more thoughtfully arranged.
What this means is that, the tire’s weight is distributed over a larger area of rubber, which reduces the pressure each tread lug experiences as it meets the road, bumping up the tire’s tread life.
So, while both tires come with similar treadwear warranties, you’re likely to squeeze out a few more miles with the Eagle Exhilarate.
Conclusion
Given the complexity of our comparison, let’s steer our course toward a simple conclusion.
Now, here, the Eagle Exhilarate stands out for its enhanced lateral traction and overall handling. Though lacks to its counterpart in terms of dry braking.
On wet roads, it provides superior handling, and steering responsiveness, along with hydroplaning resistance, but again lacks to Eagle Sport All Season in wet braking.
In terms of winter performance though, the Eagle Sport clearly wins out in all performance metrics.
Though it lacks to Exhilarate in terms of overall road comfort, and tread longevity, as well as fuel economy.
