Quality Budget Winter Tyre

My tuppence.

Falken and Toyo are nowhere near as good as their internet hero status would suggest. Falken start off fine but their wet performance degrades extremely quickly. Toyos I just don't like. Weird tramliney squishy squidgy feeling. Not for me - and an interesting blend of rapid wear and average grip. I don't even like the progressiveness. The Toyo track tyres are a different matter, but I've been singularly unimpressed with all their road tyres.

Goodyear Eagle F1 Assymetric 2 and Michelin Pilot Sport 2 or 3 are where my money goes. Of those, the Goodyears are my favourites. For summer tyres, Quality Budget Tyre is an oxymoron.

For a "budget" winter tyre that actually works properly in winter, Nokians repeatedly rank favourably in objective testing.
 
I have to agree with Everton I've had Falken FK452's on two different cars and inspite of being a "budget" tyre aledgedly were awesome in the wet, there is a particular roundabout round here where i've had front end slides in the wet on several different brands of tyre the FK452's never slide once and even handled the really bad snow back in 2010 without any problems.

I've been running Hankook Ventus Prime 2 - K115 on the Cougar for the last 4-5 months and these have proved really good, no wet road slides, very little road noise and a nice ride, I am running at a slightly higher pressure than the stock 215's these are 225/50 at 32 front 30 rear.

I really bought these after a lot of looking around as they were rated at B for noise levels and B for wet grip and have proved to be just as good as stated, sadly they are now running out it seems and have been superseeded by Hankook :( but Camskills still have some at sensible money 225/50VR-16 bought 2 for less than £160.