How does the design of a tire impact its performance?

A tire’s tread design – the grooves and patterns in the rubber on the top surface of the tire – is crucial to its performance. The tread design plays an essential role in your tire’s grip in different types of driving conditions and can impact both your safety and your driving pleasure.

Safety – wet road grip example

To understand the role of the tire tread on wet roads, it’s useful to think of a water pump. The more channels in your tire’s tread, the better it pumps water away from the tire and the road. Remarkably, it can displace water in just a few milliseconds. A 195/65R15 tire, for instance, can displace almost 3.96 gallons of water per second.

Design elements that impact wet grip:

• Groove ratio: The more/larger grooves a tire has, the better the tire pumps out water.
• Shape and layout: The shape of the tread patterns (symmetrical, directional, asymmetrical) contributes to how quickly water is drained.
• Sipes: These are thin slits in the rubber surface of the tread. They improve traction in wet or icy conditions. Acting like windshield wipers, sipes help the edges and grooves of a tire to drain away water.

Design elements that impact dry grip:

• The tire’s profile (shape): A flat profile with square shoulders provides good support in turns.
• The amount of grooves: The smaller the percentage of grooves in the tread pattern, the more rubber there is in direct contact with the ground and the better the level of grip.
• Tread blocks: The larger the individual blocks of tread rubber in the design, the better the traction. But this can also generate more road noise.
• Self locking sipes: Tread blocks with many sipes will reduce the rigidity of the tread pattern. To counter this effect, we have introduced complex 3-dimensional sipes, which lock together under load.