STEPHEN BAYLEY

The Aesthete

Here’s something you never, ever hear: ‘I’ve had a terrific week. Made a fortune! I must buy tyres!’ Tyres are boring. Tyres have no emotional attributes. US airmen used to describe the preflight check as ‘kick the tyres, light the fires’. That ‘kick’ suggests a certain lack of respect. Tyres play no conscious part in a consumer’s appreciation of his new car. Most new cars are replaced before new pneumatics are required. Yet tyres, at a level below cognition, make a significant contribution to a car’s aesthetic.

The Michelin brothers, tyre pioneers related to Charles (dirty Mac) Macintosh, were quick to realise their product’s deficiencies in terms of desire. Looking at a pile of tyres at the 1894 exhibition in Lyon, they perceived an appealing hominid character who might serve to promote the brand.

From this surreal inspiration arose Monsieur Bibendum, the inflatable man: they could have called him Peregrinabundus, which is Latin for ‘travelling’, but decided instead on Bibendum, which is approximately Latin for ‘Cheers!’

Soon, the Michelin Guide Rouge was directing drivers to lunch. This connection of driving and restaurant-going was marketing genius: if you can’t create a demand for tyres, create a demand for pleasurable journeys that consume them.

Michelin also invented architecture as advertisement. London’s Michelin House opened in Chelsea in 1911, a unique concrete construction designed by François Espinasse, but even more remarkable were the 34 panels of encaustic tiles illustrating the Paris-Brest and ParisBordeaux time trials and road races that created the Michelin reputation. Monsieur Bibendum featured in the stained glass and there was an aura of glamour.

Soon there were imitators. Fort Dunlop appeared on the A47 in east Birmingham in 1916; 12 years later, there was the magnificent Firestone factory on the Great West Road by architects Wallis, Gilbert & Partners, designers also of the fabulous Art Deco Hoover building. Like temples on the roads to Rome, Firestone and Hoover were sacred sites on all the roads that led to London.

Tyres have had brief moments when they had the attention of aesthetes. Throughout the 1950s, the whitewall became a token of de luxe sophistication, especially in America. And in California, hot rodders led by George Barris used to cut names into sidewalls.

At Indianapolis, Firestone and Goodyear picked out their names in colour and, as a child, I could think of almost nothing more exciting.

For a while, the Cinturato (which is simply Italian for ‘radial’) seemed as sophisticated as a Pucci dress discarded on the back seat of a Lancia B20. Indeed, Pier Luigi Nervi’s Pirelli Building in Milan was the greatest architecture of the dolce vita moment and a reminder of the sprezzatura that tyre companies once possessed. But that has changed. The market once dominated by the legacy manufacturers Michelin, Pirelli, Continental and even Dunlop was disrupted first by Japan’s Bridgestone, then by Korea’s Hankook and Kumho. Soon, by China’s Zhongce Rubber Group.

Nevertheless, young designers are infatuated by what tyres can do for the visual aspect of the cars in their dreams. Every concept car sketch I have ever seen has extreme low-profile tyres to create dramatic proportions. So extreme that in some cases it is almost as if the tyres do not exist: just a gestural slick of black around a humungous rim.

Maybe this is an occult acknowledgement of how boring tyres are. It certainly shows how detached designers are from the real world of car use. One of the great unannounced product benefits of a large four-wheel-drive is that the high-profile tyres remove the wrack from the nerves of urban parking.

If low-profile tyres are so desirable as aids to the semantics of performance, why do Formula 1 cars not have them? Instead, they have tyres almost balloon in aspect. I have often asked this of people with knowledge of the situation and the answer seems to be that in F1 the suspension exists to keep the car flat and true.

The tyres are there to offer compliance not provided by the suspension, so the drivers don’t have their teeth shaken out. It might be added that high-profile tyres have space on the sidewall for P-I-R-E-L-L-I to be writ helpfully large for promotional purposes.

Of course, there is science here as well as art. In LJK Setright’s masterly 1968 book The Grand Prix Car 19541966 there is a bravura chapter on tyres where the ambitious bullshitter can get a grip on contact patches, slip angles and self-aligning torque.

But that techno-romantic moment has now passed. Here’s another thing you will never hear: someone bragging about high hysteresis.

‘IF LOW-PROFILE TYRES AID THE SEMANTICS OF PERFORMANCE, WHY DON’T F1 CARS HAVE THEM?’

STEPHEN BAYLEY SB is the individual for whom the term ‘design guru’ could have been coined. He was the founding director of London’s Design Museum and his best-selling books include Sex, Drink and Fast Cars and Taste: the Secret Meaning of Things.