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Yes, winter tyres have better grip on packed snow and icy roads than standard tyres. There’s no debate. But how do they perform when there’s no snow, when it’s just wet or even warm and dry?

We weren’t too sure either, so rather than fit them to our Mini Countryman test car in November, as it began to get seriously cold, we waited so that we could try the car on the ‘standard’ Goodyear EfficientGrip tyres in the snow. Well, the result was somewhere between unimpressive and terrifying.

     
With its four-wheel drive, the Mini was able to pick up speed pretty quickly on the flat, even on icy surfaces, but any attempt at slowing or changing direction was met with resistance, or, more accurately, the complete absence of it. It simply kept on going. It’s a recognised danger of 4WD in the winter, the misplaced confidence it gives you, but this was more than that.
     
So we swapped to Pirelli Sottozero winter tyres, in this case using Mini’s service which stores the summer tyres for you until you need them again in the spring. And, of course, we experienced the dramatic difference we were expecting. The most obvious boost was the lateral stability. The car started turning in properly and stopped breaking away at the rear in corners.
     
Once the snow had melted, we also tested the car on the wet handling circuit at the MIRA test centre, where we’d timed it during the autumn. Traditionally, winter tyres are expected to give a better wet weather grip than the standard fit, but we found that on ‘summer’ tyres the average wet lap was 1min 14.4sec, whereas on winter tyres it was 1min 16.8sec, more than two seconds off the pace.
     

We also kept the tyres on through winter and well into spring, so that we could see how they behaved in warmer weather – the spec says that the softer rubber gives better performance at any temperature less than 7deg C, but it’s not so clear how they behave above that. There didn’t seem to be any impact at all on fuel economy, measured over several months, but I did notice that once the temperatures started getting near 20deg or so the car’s handling began to deteriorate – it ran wide quite easily – and a couple of degrees more and there was a noticeable drop-off in braking performance.
     
What did we learn from this six-month test? We already knew that there was a colossal boost from using winter tyres in icy conditions, but importantly we confirmed that you can use them quite happily at 15deg and under. Which means that you should feel confident swapping over at any time from now on. The important thing is to remember to swap back once you’re sure the winter conditions are gone for good.