Rubber Side Down 

Olaf Wolff
AllAboutBikes Staff Writer

Regardless of how sweet your engine’s singing, how precisely dialed-in you finally tweaked the suspension. This can be your track, and you’re in a crazy groove, riding like a Jedi. If your tires suck. It’s a big no-go.

Yes Billy, in the bigs, tire compound selection is rocket science – have no doubts about that. The difference between rubber that melts, blisters, or crumbles on a hellishly hot asphalt-liquefying track and those that wear evenly, yanking-hold like a Magic Mountain rollercoaster – is the difference between wins and DNF’s – no doubts about that either.

 

Wheel-meats need to withstand repetitive bursts of volatile horsepower, then decelerations from 190 mph to 50 within a limited few heartbeats because some joker thought a diminishing radius turn would be funny at the end of a long straightaway. They need to stick like white-on-rice and they need to do it without unraveling halfway through the race.

Of course when the weather turns and it gets as cold-as-a-well-diggers-ass. And maybe it rains straight-lines of grey water and your needing to crave out at least two-square inches of surface contact to keeping from completely hydroplaning at triple-digit speeds – well, that’ll totally requires a different flubber compound Dr. Peabody.

Dunlop Racing Tires

Writing a Dunlop tire ad was never the plan. I swear. I was attempting to write something nice about racing tires. I feel bad for tires. They take all the beating and never get the girl. When I started doing research though here’s what I found.

Miguel Duhamel, Jake Zemke, Mat Mladin, Ben Spies, Tommy Hayden, Jamie Hacking, Roger Lee Hayden, Ben Bostrom, Eric Bostrom, Jason Disalvo, Aaron Yates, Josh Hayes, Aaron Gobert and Jeff Ward. AMA Superbike Championships 17 years in a row.

Okay, what the hell? I know there are other tire manufacturers. Either they need to win more races or work harder on their Internet babble because this makes me not want to look any further – but I did.

“Dunlop is the only motorcycle tire manufacturer in North America,” that explains some of it. With their DOTs and Slicks called "N-Tech," it's now real common to see the fastest lap times occur in the last 5 laps of an AMA race, not the first 5, like they used to be. And isn’t that the point I was attempting to make earlier.

I’m not kidding; I really can’t find anything else pertaining to winning race tires or specifications. That’s how freaking top-secret tires are. If I’ve recklessly overlooked another winning Superbike tire manufacturer, don’t hesitate to contact me. Metzeler, Michelin, Avon, Pirelli – come on – I know you’re out there. I’ll be more than happy to create an inadvertent ad for you too.