New shoes for La Tempesta
Monday, April 2nd, 2007
After searching (almost) everywhere for new Montreal tires, I finally found tires that not only is available to normal, red-blooded people, but also had a normal price. As mentioned before, the Montreal had some rather unusual tires for 1971, since V-rated tyres (240 km/h) back then were few and far between. One of the few matching tyres was the Michelin XWX, but these are now prohibitively expensive and very hard to find.
Nowadays, you’ll get V-rated tyres everywhere, but the problem is to find them in the correct 195/70-VR14 dimension. The majority of 195/70-14 tyres are H- or T-rated, something that guarantees La Tempesta won’t pass inspection with the authorities when the time comes.
The fact that you can’t drive at 240 km/h anywhere in Norway with a Montreal, is not an argument at all. The official papers says V-rated tyres, so that’s what you need to show if you want regular license plates 
My very old spare tire is a Michelin XWX, but has a date stamp from 1977. The Goodyear Grand Prix’ on the car are date stamped in the mid eighties and quite brittle.
The tires I bought today are Vredestein Sprint Classic 205/70-VR14, and they cost roughly the same as any other 205 tyre.