Road Trips or Ego Trip?

There are 30,000 miles on the o.e.m. Michelin high-performance 4-season tires on my Civic Si.  Over the life of the car, one of them has lost pressure with increasing frequency.  The tire pressure lite now comes on every two weeks.  And it's always the same one that's lost 18% of its air.

The sensible thing to do would be to check for a pin-hole puncture.  The tires have at least another 10,000 miles in them.  They're OK in snow, and especially good through standing water on Interstates.  (I can track through water that used to float my 1994 Chrysler New Yorker.)  And they're good enough for my skill level on the Tail of the Dragon, or the occasional conga line at an HSAX drivers' school.

 Instead, I went to the Tire Rack website. It is an excellent shopping aid.  Why not use a minor problem as an excuse to upgrade?

The Good News is that there's a strong alloy wheel that weighs 5 lbs. less than most others.  That's a   significant saving in unsprung weight.  BTW, for a street-driven car, aggressively upgrading the size of your rims is a bad idea: weight is your enemy.  It expresses itself as rotational inertia: the flywheel effect doesn't help when you're accelerating or braking.  And an increase in unsprung weight may tax your suspension as it tries to keep the tire on the road over bumps.

The Bad News is that I can't find a grippier tire than those that came on the car without going to a summer-only tire.  And a radical one at that.  (That is, its construction as well as asymmetric tread pattern.)  The stickiest summer-only tires look like they would aquaplane more in deep water, not just spin in light snow.

So, after fantasizing about putting "big rubber" on my daily driver, I will probably mount o.e.m. replacement tires on lighter rims.  I won't slay the Dragon.  I just want to pet it now and then.  Nice Dragon!