Recently, the fine folks at Bridgestone Tires invited us to attend one of their “Drive and Learn” events. These events are primarily designed to educate sales people and distributors about new products and how they perform. Luckily for us, Bridgestone also invites some ham-fisted media people to give the tires a go, too. We were on hand to test out the new Potenza RE970AS Pole Position, which is an all season performance tire and the Potenza S-04 Pole Position, which is a summer high performance tire that may be the ticket for your Pro Touring ride that sees lots of street action and the occasional autocross. 

The neat thing about this event was the fact that Bridgestone really puts their money where their mouth is. Testing is done using eight identical BMW Three-Series sedans. Why Eight? Simple, four of them have the Bridgestone offerings on them, two have competitive tires from Pirelli, and two are shorn with Michelins.

The testing arena is what you would typically refer to as an autocross course, laid out with cones. Designed to show the performance of the tires in cornering, accelerating, and braking, we were able to make multiple laps in each car with each different set of tires on it. Each car was equipped with a professional driving instructor who was there to keep us from wrecking anything or attempting to get air. We were not guided or influenced in any way and were encouraged to ask questions and share out honest opinions and impressions of the tires after we had given them a work out. 

First, the car. We’re not going to kid you, our time behind the wheel of new BMW three-series sedans is pretty limited. Zero mintues, actually. We did have some historical knowledge on our side, having driven several examples of older generation three series in the past. As good as those were, this car was better. These were not M models, but just “run of the mill” civilian BMWs. The power is more than adequate, not drag race fun, but enough to shove the car along with a good amount of scoot. The balance is freaking awesome. Undoubtedly, these cars made the lot of us look and feel better than we actually were. We’re fairly positive that other cars, placed in the same situations would have killed far more cones than these workman like sedans did (we didn’t kill any, BTW).

Next the tires. There are myriad of options in high performance tires these days, and with the exploding popularity of Pro Touring rides, more and more guys are in the market for rubber that does more than just grab hold of the Earth in a straight line. While the Potenza RE970AS Pole Positon was a fine tire that we’d stick on any car we were transporting our family around in and driving in our normally, ahem, agressive manner, it was the Potenza S-04 Pole Position that really impressed us in head to head testing. 

Our seat of the pants impression of the Bridgestone was that it planted much better on turn-in and braking. It also had a much more linear feel in terms of grip as opposed to the Pilot and P-Zero. When pushed to the edge of grip, the other tires would hold and then break grip all of a sudden causing the car’s tail to snap, where the Bridgestone, when pushed into the same situation would release the grip in a more gradual fashion, allowing the car to settle into a fairly predicatble drift that was far easier (and more fun) to control.

The Potenza SO-4 is not a race tire, but it is a tire that we’d stick on a Pro Touring car or anything that sees lots of summer duty and the occasional trip around an autocross course or some fun laps on a road course. If you want to go whole hog race mode, the Potenza RE-11 is the piece for you. We did not test these tires, but the instructors were giving hot laps around the autocross course with them on a couple of the cars. Judging by the grins of some of the passengers, they work pretty damned well, too.