A Brief History
On June 19, 2005, the United States Grand Prix in Indianapolis, Indiana, suffered a mass exodus when 14 cars running on Michelin tires withdrew from the race due to tire failures by the French tire giant. Only six cars remained to race on Bridgestone tires.
Digging Deeper
Michelin and Bridgestone combine with Goodyear to make up more than half of all tire sales in the world each year. Each tire company pours millions of dollars into research to make their tires with the best wet and dry traction, best heat resistance, best gas mileage, least noise, longest wearing, and even best looking.
Many of these factors are in competition with each other, leading to some tires being specialized for certain conditions, such as dry summer driving or snowy winter driving, optimized for ice, mud, or rocks. Other tires are an “all season” compromise. Juggling these competing factors requires high technology to create formulations, tread patterns, and manufacturing techniques to reach optimum performance.
Note: This “History Short” article is optimized for YouTube to be 60 seconds long, not long enough to discuss in depth the various materials, chemical compounds, computer design and other factors that go into tire design and manufacturing. Readers and viewers are welcome to make comments or observations about any of these factors or discuss their experiences with their tires.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Cayard, Lee Harrison. The Automobile Tire Handbook. Self-Reliance Books, 2019.
Goodell, F.R. Tire Making and Merchandising. Forgotten Books, 2018.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by Dan Smith of Michael Schumacher (of the Ferrari team) in practice at the 2005 US Grand Prix at Indianapolis, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
You can also watch video versions of this article on YouTube.