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Over the past two decades, if you owned a high performance vehicle the advice you may have heard was buy summer tyres - and if you drive through the winter, buy a second set of winter tyres.
There was a belief amongst some that all-season tyres were for hatchbacks and estate cars. That if you put them on something with real power and you would be missing out on the kind of performance required to get the most out of a fast car.
That advice is now out of date. The tyre that has done most to debunk this way of thinking is the Michelin CrossClimate 3 Sport.
This is not a softened summer tyre or a sharpened touring tyre. It is an ultra-high-performance all-season tyre - built for cars that are fast.
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The CrossClimate 3 Sport arrived in the UK on 1 July 2025, launched alongside the standard CrossClimate 3.
Michelin UK's own announcement put it at 30 dimensions across rim sizes 18 to 21 inches, the largest of these being 295/35 R21 107Y.
Michelin's product page now lists fitments from 18 to 23 inches as the range has filled out through 2026.
Within the construction of the tyre there are two key pieces of Michelin engineering working to produce its high performance.
And in terms of the tyre's winter capability, it has earned the 3PMSF snowflake marking, with an A rating for wet grip on the European tyre label.
This is the question that perhaps matters most to high-performance owners. And, luckily, there is an unusually clean answer. In 2025 Tyre Reviews tested the new CrossClimate 3 Sport and CrossClimate 3 against the Pilot Sport 5 and Primacy 5.
In that 2025 comparison the numbers came out like this in the dry:
| Dry performance, 225/40 R18 | Michelin Pilot Sport 5 | Michelin CrossClimate 3 Sport | Michelin CrossClimate 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Braking, 100–0 km/h | 36.8 m | 38.4 m | 39.7 m |
| Handling lap | 1:16.9 | 1:18.84 | 1:21.0 |
An all-season tyre stopping just 1.6 metres further than a dedicated performance summer tyre from 100 km/h, and achieving a two per cent slower lap time, is not a compromise most would notice on the road.
In a 2026 run of the same test, which extended the field up to the Pilot Sport Cup 2 R semi-slick, there was a result to make people sit up and seriously take notice. The CrossClimate 3 Sport beat the Primacy 5, a summer tyre, around the dry handling lap.
Similarly, the CC3 Sport won overall in AutoView's 2026 all-season test, fitted in 255/45 R19 on a BMW 520i:
| AutoView 2026, 255/45 R19 | Result |
|---|---|
| Dry braking, 62–0 mph | 121 ft — best in test |
| Cornering speed | 45.9 mph — best in test |
| Subjective dry handling | 7.6 — best in test |
| Subjective comfort | 7.3 — best in test |
| Wet braking | 2nd, behind Continental AllSeasonContact 2 at 89 ft |
Dry pace is the easy part. Wet grip is where all-season tyres have historically been caught out. But again, the CrossClimate 3 Sport has bucked trends with good performances.
Against its own stablemate in that 2025 Tyre Reviews comparison, it gave up around four metres in wet braking to the Pilot Sport 5 and was nearly seven seconds slower around the wet handling lap.
Measured against other all-season tyres, though, it is top of the class. In Tyre Reviews' ten-tyre test for 2026/27 it recorded the best wet braking and the best rolling resistance in the field. For the highest subjective dry handling score the tyre finished second overall.
A case against all-season tyres has often come in regard to the performance in snow. Although they do perform better than a summer, they lack the same levels when compared to dedicated winter tyres.
In many respects however, that is the wrong test for most of the UK.
The Met Office's provisional figures for winter 2025/26 put the UK mean temperature at 4.94°C, with England at 5.69°C, Wales at 5.52°C and Scotland at 3.49°C.
We have a very specific kind of weather. It’s what makes old Blighty a unique place - cold enough that a summer compound is working well outside its best range, wet enough that grip matters constantly - and almost never snowy enough to justify a dedicated winter tyre.
Essentially the climate in the UK is the exact gap an all-season tyre is designed to fill.
From a legal perspective, there is no UK law requiring winter tyres – like you find in some other European countries. This is why so many people have, historically, run summer tyres year-round by default. Tyres like the CrossClimate 3 Sport are changing this though.
Fit dedicated summer tyres in the warmer months and dedicated winter tyres in the colder, and you are buying two full sets, potentially every year.
However, a single set of CrossClimate 3 Sport removes this need for two sets of tyres. Keeping the car on a tyre rated A for wet grip in every month of the year rather than only half of them.
There is a running cost in its favour too. In most sizes, the tyre mainly achieves a B for rolling resistance on the European label. And in the Tyre Reviews' ten-tyre group it recorded the best rolling resistance in the field. This is a measured advantage that shows up as fuel used on a ICE cars and as range on an EV. Every mile the tyre is on the vehicle.
That is where the premium position earns itself back: not in the price at the checkout, but in buying one set instead of two and running it efficiently while it is on the car.
The Michelin CrossClimate 3 Sport is the first all-season tyre a performance car driver can fit without feeling they have settled for something less, when compared with a top of the range dedicated summer tyre.
It has won an independent all-season test outright on dry braking, cornering speed and subjective handling. On top of this it took best wet braking and best rolling resistance in a ten-tyre field.
And we've not even covered the fact that an electric performance car maker chose it as original equipment – the Alpine A390. That is also a worthy of note.
To ensure we are balanced, it is important to recognise what you give up. Which is wet pace against a proper summer tyre.
Set against that is what you stop paying for: a second set of tyres, two changeovers a year and somewhere to store the ones you aren't using. Judged over the life of the tyre rather than the price on the day, that is where the case for it is strongest.
If you drive something quick, you drive it all year, and you would rather own one set of tyres than two, this is now the tyre to beat.
If your priority is snow, or your wheels are smaller than 18 inches, buy the standard CrossClimate 3.
Buy the Michelin CrossClimate 3 Sport
Every performance figure above comes from independent testing — Tyre Reviews and AutoView — and links to it. Michelin's own claims about its tyres are drawn from michelin.co.uk and labelled as Michelin's claims. Climate figures are Met Office provisional statistics.
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