TYRE TECH HOW TO MAKE HOOPS
Tyres are just black and round, right? Well, not exactly. To be specific, they would be brown if it wasn’t for an ingredient called carbon black being added to the mix, but more about that later. The point is that it’s all too easy to just dismiss tyres as dull and unimportant because they aren’t colourful or noisy, which is doing them and the people who design, test and build them a massive disservice.
It is true that, apart from a tread pattern, all tyres look the same, but it is also true that due to the complexity and variables of a tyre’s mechanical and chemical construction, they are anything but. Tyre tests that use rider feedback as well as lap times prove that they aren’t all the same, and that tuning a tyre for best grip, stability, wear and handling characteristics is every bit as hi-tech for the people whose job it is to make engines more powerful and more environmentally friendly, or the electronic systems smoother, more responsive and with more functions. It’s just that where people involved with motorcycle design tend to be engineers from a given background or discipline, tyre designers are a very different breed – chemists.
Tyres are big business, very big business, and because even the process that a tyre is manufactured affects how the tyre performs and its characteristics, getting past the reception area of a tyre manufacturer is basically impossible, such are the levels of secrecy surrounding every single stage of a tyre’s life – from concept to manufacture. When the chance came my way to have a poke around the Avon Tyres facility in Melksham and meet some of the design team, the significance wasn’t lost... so off to Wiltshire I went.
For some scale of just how big the motorcycle tyre industry is, Avon is a relative minnow because it only has 170 people on the shop floor, producing a mere 1200 tyres per day, every day. The total headcount for Avon at Melksham is more than 300 on the site that once
