HARD WORK BEHIND THE SCENES
BY THE TIME the glossy brochures are printed and on display – and tyres have landed in the retail outlets – all the hard work has been done, with this development trip the perfect example. By spending many hours in testing, the brand can be confident the product will be more than up to the task after being hammered through the outback. This doesn’t mean this trip is just about punishing tyres and seeing if they ‘survive’, there’s a little bit more to it than that.
For this week of Corner Country testing, the team at Exclusive Tyres has set-up a straightforward and very effective testing protocol: one Toyota Land Cruiser LC 79 Troopy will be fitted with the prototype AT3 LT, another with the previous-gen AT3, and there will be two ‘control’ Troopies, each fitted with a competitor’s equivalent-spec tyre. As well, the new AT3 XLT (a slightly chunkier style of AT3 with beefier traction shoulders down the sides) is fitted to the Cooper Tires Ranger and Prado. The drivers will be swapping vehicles each day – and swapping notes – to help determine the extent of the improvements designed into the new tyre.
Things like ride, handling, how the steering is affected, how the tyre reacts (and drives) over different terrain, how/if the tyres are chipping (one of the main things addressed with this latest incarnation of the AT3 design); the week will see us cover everything from smooth, graded dirt to tracks covered in stones the size of a large avocado. All of the drivers on this trip are experienced off-road tourers, and the combined notes and observations will help form a firm view on the new tyres’ performance.
For those who are after a little more science to back-up the opinions, there are regular tread checks (for tears, slices, etc.), tyre temperature checks, and tyre air pressure observations throughout each day.
“The most important part about tyre evaluation is consistency,” says Andrew Collings, also one of the drivers on this trip. “We need to ensure all tyres – Cooper and the competitors’ products – remain at evaluation pressures for the whole trip. By doing this, the variables are more focused on what we intend to evaluate. We also watch temperature to ensure the pressures we have set-up in all tyres are not increasing by more than four to five psi from cold. We would see this increase as normal and outside this psi increase it may indicate that the tyre sidewall-flex is building heat in the tyre, and therefore the load or speed needs to be adjusted so the tyre performance is not affected.”
The testers keep an eye out for an over-average temperature spike; increasing the tyre’s pressure alleviates the heat build-up, thus ensuring the tyre will stay within the testing protocols. A hot tyre can also cause deterioration in the carcass and lead to failure, which is the last thing you want when travelling through remote areas.