This time I was able to really enjoy the smooth control and sharp response provided by the Rival, so much that my first run was a little thrashy with plenty of squealing understeer and oversteer, a perfect example of hooninganism. The bad guy was the Hankook Ventus R-S3 sized 245/40ZR18, same as in our previous test with the Subaru STI. Now that I was more familiar with my new best friend, the BFG Rival, I was eager to get into the next game, hmm sorry … “exercise.” Behind our ready and brave E46 M3s, a longer autocross was offering its faster corners and high-speed slaloms. Unfortunately, my driving skills fell short and I could not keep the tires at maximum grip long enough to get a reading better than 1.16g. Happy with myself I jumped into the final car, which was equipped with the BFG R1S confident that I could beat my earlier performance. Rich of my first experience, I managed to get the car on the line a little better and play with the throttle so that it was not a total embarrassment, and that landed me a decent 1.16g of lateral force. I wanted more, and slid into the BFG Rival equipped car. The Comp-2 was very easy to control and smooth but gave lower lateral G-force results – roughly 0.8g.

This time around we only experienced the BFGoodrich brand, starting with the small brother, the BFG Comp-2, then the middle brother, the BFG Rival, and finished with the very serious and sticky BFG R1S. You are all familiar with the skid pad exercise, take a car, lock the steering angle on the inside line of the circle and keep increasing but steady throttle until you reach the maximum lateral G-forces. I have to admit that the Toyos are the cheapest of the bunch, but after such a short number of runs, I’d be upset to see my tires looking so sorry. The Hankooks looked decent but already showed a slight edge deformation while the Toyos looked like they had been on the losing end of a battle with a box of razor blades. At the end of the exercise, the Rivals looked far better than their competition. We started the session with brand new tires, our test group put 30 runs on the competing tires and 45 on the BFG Rivals.

After driving the three different configurations back to back and talking with the other journalist in attendance, everybody felt the same and ranked the Rivals on top of the other two.įor future buyers, the most telling test was the appearance of the tires after a couple of torturous runs. While all the three sets of tires are very competent and feel at home on the short track, the new BFG Rival brings an additional sharpness to the steering that the other two couldn’t match. The Autocross track was small and ideal to test the behavior of the tires in sharp turns and hard braking. First car was mounted with the new BFGoodrich G-Force Rivals, the other two were equipped with competing products aka Hankook Ventus R-S3s and Toyo Proxes R1Rs. We started the day on a triplet of Subaru WRX STIs fitted with 245/40R18 tires.

G force sport comp 2 vs hankook rs3