Review: Kumho’s New Line of Ecsta Sport Tires Offers Solid Performance and Solid Value

Educated drivers of sports cars and performance cars—at least those who care about more than raw straight-line speed—are typically aware of the fact tires are the single most effective way to improve their vehicle’s performance. The rubber between your car and the road goes a long way toward dictating how it handles and of course translates directly to overall grip and traction levels. So, it’s a big deal for cars whose handling is a huge selling point. In other words, before you begin to blow your dollars on upgrades to other mechanical parts in search of more speed, make sure you’re running on a competent tire.

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What Is Kumho, and What Is the Ecsta Sport Tire?

You’re almost certainly familiar with big-name tiremakers like Michelin, Pirelli, Goodyear, Bridgestone, and Continental—known within the business as Tier 1 suppliers, due to their offering the “Best” products, in industry-speak. You also might be well aware of smaller South Korean tire company Kumho, founded in 1960, and known for manufacturing product at a more affordable price point.

Keeping with that theme, Kumho—considered a Tier 2 supplier like Firestone (“Better” than Tier 3, which is known as “Good”) based on factors like price—offers a new line of high-performance summer and all-season tires. Replacing the previous Ecsta PA51 family and dubbed Ecsta Sport A/S (all season), Ecsta Sport, and Ecsta Sport S, the company says they provide serious dynamic performance while costing approximately 35-percent less than the big-boy manufacturers, depending on which vehicle, tire size, and version of the Ecstas you’re looking at.

None of this is to say Kumho is a tiny operation—it employs more than 10,000 people in 180 countries around the world, including eight production factories and five research and development centers. Tire Business last year said Kumho was the world’s 11th-largest tiremaker in 2023, and Kumho expects to be named in the top 10 when Tire Business announces its rankings for 2024.

Kumho intends the new Ecsta line to contribute notably to its push toward expanding its market share. Making its case that it deserves to be in the conversation when the topic of performance driving arises, it says it invested a lot of time creating these products: According to the company, most tires are developed over a two-year R&D cycle whereas “it took 5 years” to bring the Ecsta Sport and Sports S to market, and more than three years for the Ecsta Sport A/S.

In other words, it aimed to deliver near or better-than Tier 1 performance without smoking its customers’ pockets as if their wallets were a set of tires being abused on a drop-clutch launch.

Performance Values

Kumho invited us to sample the Ecsta Sport tires at Atlanta Motorsports Park on several different cars and in several different conditions, but it’s worth noting it didn’t have any competitor tires on hand to compare directly against them. It did, however, flaunt the results of independent third-party tire-industry metric tests that say the various Ecstas come darn close to or even beat comparable Michelin products, as one example, in key categories.

In the case of the Ecsta Sport and Sport S, the results say they outperform Michelin in wet and dry braking, wet handling, noise levels, and durability, while not being far off in terms of dry-pavement handling. As for the all-season model, it allegedly betters the “M Brand,” as Kumho refers to the French company, in wet braking while equaling it in noise levels and coming close to it in the handling stakes.

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Seat of the Pants

We can’t call this experience a true “test” due to the lack of any other tire brands to try out on the same cars on the same day on the same pavement. Kumho also didn’t give us any opportunities to measure braking distances or lateral g loads. Thus, we’re talking seat-of-the pants feel, but with loads of miles on other tires under our belts as reference, the driving experiences at AMP provided enough information to be relatively insightful.

Beginning on a wet circular skidpad with the Ecsta all-seasons mounted on both a front-engine 2024 Ford Mustang and mid-engine 2016 Porsche Cayman GTS, Kumho’s do-everything tire demonstrated strong traction and water-channeling prowess. Turning off traction and stability control while pushing both cars past the ultimate grip limit and inducing front-grinding understeer or tail-wagging oversteer required a darn fair amount of provocation, and the tires’ behavior remained tame once either end of the Ford or Porsche became wayward.

Equally important, it was easy to regain control of sideways skids like you might encounter on public roads in poor weather conditions, thanks to progressive rather than knife-edge snappy behavior. We also tried the A/S mounted on a Mustang around a dry autocross course, where it felt responsive enough and demonstrated enough grip to make it feel worthwhile rather than a goofy exercise in all-season-rubber-destroying silliness.

That said, you don’t want to employ such tires if you take something like autocrossing even remotely seriously, so we then tried another 2016 Cayman GTS fitted with the grippier Ecsta Sports. This is where the tires came most alive, providing good steering and braking responses and feedback. The rear-wheel-drive Cayman was easy to rotate on corner entry using these tires—and it was easy to slide the rears if we wanted to create a bit of a mini drifting show.

The latter approach isn’t going to net you the quickest time of the day at your local autocross contest, but it’s a boatload of fun and the Ecsta Sports’ ability to deliver quick, predictable handling indicate to us it could be a pretty solid choice for regular autocrossers who aren’t using competition-specific rubber, even more so due to its price compared to the more expensive competition.

And if you do like to light up your rear tires—autocross or elsewhere—in the name of fun-but-tire-and-cash-melting drifts, that equation becomes even more appealing.

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Finally, Kumho sent us out onto AMP’s full road-racing circuit, a quick and challenging layout with fun elevation changes and corners that put heavy lateral loads through a car’s chassis and tires. We first drove a 2016 Porsche 911 Carrera 4S using the Ecsta Sport, then got into a full-on race car—a 2020 Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 Clubsport with the Manthey Racing package and a set of Ecsta Sport S rubber installed.

This is where the Kumhos’ performance faltered a bit compared to what we’re used to from something like a Michelin Pilot Sport 4S. That’s something Kumho’s cited third-party testing indicated in giving these tires slightly lower marks in dry-weather performance, too.

In both cars, particularly the race car even with the stickier Ecsta Sport S tires, the performance and chassis-balance consistency weren’t as good as the best-performing Tier 1 hi-po products on the market.

Neither Ecsta Sport model felt bad; they were again easy to recover when we stepped over the limit. They simply didn’t have quite as much overall grip as the so-called M Brand, and it wasn’t always easy to predict whether it would be the front or rear tires that let go of the road first, resulting in moments of oversteer to understeer and back again.

It could be that the 911’s exceptionally stiff underlying platform—even more so in the full-on 718 GT4 race car—and rapidity of response to steering inputs is a bit much for the Ecstas’ construction, be it the sidewall, tread, or a combination of both. Perhaps a car with a bit of a softer suspension setup would work better here by giving the tires fractionally more time to respond to what the driver asks of them.

Final Word

The new Kumho Ecsta Sport series is a seriously strong option for performance car drivers who are budget conscious and/or simply don’t prioritize absolute ultimate grip and having the highest possible dry-weather cornering capability possible in a non-track-focused tire. Not everyone who drives such cars does so in a manner where they need it, and in real-world scenarios, these tires’ seemingly—from what we experienced—outstanding wet-weather and braking capabilities are notably significant selling points and just as important as outright handling. And for drivers who do enjoy sliding around a bit for fun when pushing hard at the expense of the absolute quickest way through corners, let alone full-on drifting, that could be an unintended selling point of its own.

If your car needs a new set of shoes and you are interested in Kumho’s Ecstas, check out tire retailers like Tire Rack, as various sizes and vehicle fitments are now beginning to trickle into retailers’ hands.