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Originally Posted by M3 Adjuster
I am not yet aware of a " compound change/redesisgn" of a tire with the same name where there was a marked improvement over the original...
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I wouldn't read much into a name... The PZero was released back in the 80s and the name hasn't changed at all. Yet it still wins tests, because it's totally different in every way except the name...
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Point being that engineers make tires, marketing guys name them, and one often has very little to do with the other. And tires have come a long, long way since ~2004 when the original Pilot Sport Cup was released.
As a measure of exactly how far, Walter Rohrl was recently asked why the Porsche 918 was over 30 seconds faster than the Carrera GT of a decade ago (7:28 vs 6:57). He didn't say 4wd, electronics or power. He answered with a single word: tires.
Michelin shares a lot of technology between the Cup and street tires. The original Cup came out with the first PS2 back in the early 2000s. Now we have the PSS, and the the Cup 2 to go with it. I expect a similar advance.
Certainly tires
are tuned for specific vehicles, the PS2s on our 1M being an example- tuned for the M3, it uses a sticker compound that the PS2s on the M5, for example. Tests so far, however, on cars like the 997 the tire wasn't designed for, indicate this is not that type of targeted tuning, but rather a pretty big step forward across the board. But we'll see.