METZELER KAROO STREET
METZELER’S KAROO tyre range has been a bit of a staple among adventure riders for some time now. What has been lacking, though, is a Karoo that could handle the power of bigger adventure bikes, which can easily destroy them if ridden with some verve. Block patterns and big horsepower sometimes struggle to play nice together. That’s now a thing of the past, it seems, with the Karoo Street designed to handle all that power both on the road and in the dirt.
SYNTHETIC DREAMS
Prior to sampling the Karoo Street I was given a lengthy tour of the Pirelli/ Metzeler factory just outside Frankfurt in Germany, giving me a wonderful insight into how Metzeler and Pirelli tyres are designed and made. Head of R&D, Oliver Haupt, took me on a journey from the way the tyres are developed, to the last part of the process: inspection and then packaging.
The Pirelli/Metzeler concern has a number of factories throughout the world, with the original factory in Frankfurt making essentially all the radial tyres, to newer factories in China, Indonesia and Brazil making the crossply range.
It’s a fascinating process, and
