eharleq

Amazing how a tire tread design evolves. Must have saved the old molds.

Bollinger

You were probably fooled by the marketing gimmick of the goofy original aquatred tread. The secret is the compound, not the tread. The tread really only matters in very deep water.

Goodyear discovered years ago that slicks with high silica content would outperform grooved tires with old-style compounds in all but the deepest water.

eharleq

But nobody in the performance market uses old compounding. The tread does play a huge a huge part in the handling dry/wet. Just look at the difference between an 008 and 032 yok in the wet/dry.

Bollinger

I didn't say anyone uses old compounds anymore, although some do. All major manufacturers offer a non-silica compound tire right now. I'm not sure why.

I didn't say tread didn't do anything. I said it didn't do much on the Aquatred.

For the most part though, tread design is relatively simple.

In the dry, the less void space, the better. Slicks are the best of course as they have no void space. In the wet, whatever void space there is should be designed to push water out from under the tires, not trap it. Any V-shaped pattern on the tread will do a decent job, the angle of the V depends on your target speed. Unless you plan to make the tire directional you need to further complicate the design so that it acts like a V in either direction.

After that, the rest of the tread design is all just a compromise between comfort, noise and traction.

I didn't mean to destroy your original post, which was both on topic and humorous. I just wanted to clarify that because the new Aquatred has the same tread as the old Gatorback doesn't mean it performs the same. I think I did a bad job of it.

SAvant

Yoko A008. Used to be the top dog performance tire. Was OEM for Porsche for a while.

eharleq

The central void is the most important for deeper water traction. The original aquatread hit this dead on. (As did the real predecessors, Continental! and the Brit twin tire.) What they discovered was that handling suffered from a lack of centering rib in the middle. Then, they went with the now-universal two-groove design.

The real issue, as you allude to, is marketing. Mom and pop shouldn't be going 100 in the rain. The central void design is great for very wide tires, at high speed, in deep water. People who need that, also want handling (which it doesn't provide). So, it ended up being a marketing ploy for "safety".