Tread Talks: Understanding how to judge a tyre

Tyres are the single-most crucial aspect of keeping you smoothly rolling down the road without testing the grip levels of your plump behinds. I say single, but I mean double. There’s no need to get pedantic. I digress. As automotive journalists, we are often tasked with reviewing tyres for cars and bikes. To do so, we usually get the Vbox out and measure figures such as acceleration and braking in dry and wet conditions. Then, of course, we drive or ride up and down our favourite roads, familiar roads, to get a feel for the kind of performance these tyres offer. This approach helps us back up what we feel with the numbers from the Vbox. To help us better develop our ability to test motorcycle tyres and to also shed light on the amount of work that goes into the development of its tyres, Eurogrip Tyres took us to Kari Motor Speedway in Coimbatore.

Here we had access to Vittorio Iannuzzo and Toshihiro Wakayama, two of their top-level tyre testers and ex-racers as well. Apart from that, shedding light on the business and development side of things were Renato Zilli and V Sivaramakrishnan. They told us about the development procedures, the state-of-the-art testing facilities, R&D labs and the work involved. Because after all, Eurogrip tyres are sold in a boatload of countries, and to have that kind of reach, you do need a strong foundation. While all of that was interesting, I was keen on the real-world testing. The kind where you’re behind the ’bars and not in lab coats. Guys like Iannuzzo and Wakayama are field testers, putting their skin on the line, day in and day out, using and abusing the tyres to see whether the guys with the PhDs and engineering degrees have done a good job or not. Their testing is based on feel, and that, of course, in some way, shape, or form, is extrapolated into data and analysed to further develop the rubber. This edition of the Eurogrip Tread Talks was all about understanding how they come to conclusions about the tyres. To do so, we had a range of bikes such as the RE Classic 350, TVS Ronin, KTM 390 Duke, Yamaha MT-15, Harley-Davidson Street Rod, Kawasaki’s Versys and Ninja 650, all shod in tyres built for their specific purpose. This meant that we got access to the Beamers, Protorq Extreme and Roadhound tyres. Some of the motorcycles in the line-up aren’t exactly built with lap times in mind but the racetrack is a controlled environment allowing you to experiment without having to worry about visiting a hospital or a courthouse.

If you’re expecting to read my verdict on any of the tyres I’ve mentioned, this isn’t the article you will find that in. Iannuzzo and Wakayama gave us some tips on what to do to find out if a tyre is good or not. Of course, there are the typical things you look out for, like the feeling of grip, edge grip, stability and all of that, which you can tell from riding really fast on track. But the insight these guys gave us allowed us to test the finer nuances. Things such as trying to push the bike out of line when leaned over and pointing at the apex, braking really hard to see if the tyre skips a beat, how the bike reacts to you moving your body around in a corner. Things that you don’t want to be doing in any other riding scenario. But here is where you really understand if the bike wants to hold the line, is light enough to change direction quickly and inspire confidence under braking. You have to firstly understand what the main purpose of the tyre is and you can’t expect a set made for a commuter bike to enable an elbow down, not in the way you envisioned for sure. Keeping that in mind, this exercise has given me a lot to think about and factor in while reviewing my next set of tyres. Cold, hard data is one thing, but feel is another and a very important aspect of choosing a tyre. And with this Tread Talks session, I feel like I have a little more in my knowledge bank to err... bank on.