TESTED: MICKEY THOMPSON DEEGAN TYRES
HUGE EXPECTATIONS FOR A TYRE BEARING THE NAME OF AN OFF-ROAD RACING LEGEND.
COMING from a racing background, I was pretty excited to fit a set of the new Mickey Thompson Deegan 38s – named after legendary Motox, Rallyx and off-road racing champion Brian Deegan – to my two-door Series 1 Land Rover Discovery.
Rolling a set of Deegans on my old Disco was never going to turn it into a racing truck, but I needed something less aggressive than the mud terrains I was replacing. The new rubber needed to be quieter for long-distance tarmac driving, and they needed to grip in the dirt when in low range.
Mickey Thompson’s all-terrain Deegan 38 seemed to be the right fit, with its tough, high-tensile two-ply body cord sidewalls for increased durability, deep, open-void tread pattern, and angled shoulder scallops with a two-pitched side-biter pattern for off-road traction. The tall, square-edged (with minimal sidewall) construction gives the Deegans a race-ready and modern style, and they’d be a pretty good look on something like a modern Ranger, BT-50 or Hilux – they perked up my old bus.
The first thing I noticed on-road was how quiet and smooth these tyres are – my old Disco is pretty loose, but it never felt so smooth or tracked so straight. I was also surprised by how well they cornered in the wet. The Disco is a pre-swaybar model, so I was able to put that to good test and never lost traction, even under brakes. Off-road, the deep tread holds well and, even at road pressure, I was able to get the tyres to bag due to the square edges. Even though I’m running the standard LT225/75 R16 size, it feels like I’m running a much wider tyre due to the tread running edge to edge. And, with a silica-reinforced compound, tread durability seems great – even after a couple of runs up the challenging Rocky Track in Toolangi, Victoria, there were no cuts or chips.
The square edges and the minimal-butoffset sidewall tread-blocks were able to extract me from clay, muddy ruts on my most recent fishing trip, and with a little squirt of the throttle I was able to clear the mud from the deep tread.
I’m looking forward to putting the Deegans to the test on some upcoming longer trips. The silica-reinforced tread compound should see good longevity, but I’m just happy to have a smoother, quieter and easier-to-handle old truck.