Optima Sports Camber Tire (very cool)

TreeSemdyZee

I don't know how many people have seen this, but it looks like this guy has come up with an amazing tire technology.

http://www.internetautoguide.com/aut...463/index.html

Long video with the inventor on Jay Leno's Garage.
http://www.jaylenosgarage.com/video/...tires/1236995/

Liquid_G

why is it when you click the "optima" link in the first paragraph, (thinking its a link to the companies website) it does a search for Kia Optima... Fail..

regardless though.. sounds like an interesting idea.. it sounds like you need to add crazy camber to your car to run this tire though..

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RCZ

Very interesting...I'd be happy to try one out.

TreeSemdyZee

It worked for me.

The idea of the tire is that when you are running camber instead of having the majority of the contact patch on the inside of the tire, the whole tire is contacting the road. Since the tire in the video is at 2 degrees, you could run 2 degrees of camber and the tire would still be fully contacted. Remember camber has more to do with the geometry of the suspension, not the tire position.
The inside of the tire would have a shorter sidewall than the outer.
Also, since the physics of the tire take away the need for any toe, the wear would decrease in that area also.

Jordo!

Hmm, this + sticky compound = win

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Enjoy it. Destroy it.

AutoX Z

This tire has been debated endlessly on another forum I visit and the consensus is that this tire makes no sense and will not work as advertised. The point of camber is to compensate for when the car rolls and the suspension compresses. With a normal tire and proper camber, it will be flat on the ground at maximum cornering loads. This means a compromise of the tire being slightly angled when the suspension is in the static position. If the tire is already flat before the car rolls, when it does it will roll the tire onto the outside contact patch and shrink the contact patch.

This tire has so far been tested by a few people and failed to show any benefit over a standard tire, and is usually slower.

Here's a test automobile magazine did where the camber tire couldn't match the cornering g's from a piece of crap yokohama summer tire, no where near the "top" 140 street tires.

http://www.automobilemag.com/feature...read_wear.html

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v8zracer260z

Sounds very goo,d I'm interested to see stats on how well it improves handling and wear.

Zaggeron

Those are advertising "meta" tags in the underlying html of the page. They typically have nothing to do with the text. What they do is have a text analyzer "read" the text and create the hyperlinks to advertising pop-ups or sponsored searches. "safety" in the same paragraph links to an ad about Subaru
because the text in the Subaru add has the keyword "safety"

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2013 Subaru BRZ Limited

shabarivas

Probably will increase how many miles you get out of your tires - and def not the "handling" of your car...

TreeSemdyZee

That's kind of what the creator was talking about in the video. Whether it improves performance, only time will tell, but I'd almost guarantee longer tread life. Full contact patch and no toe seems like there'd be a noticeable increase.

kenchan

^^^ this.

Scott @ RA

I have ran racing slicks with camber built into them before, Gooyear makes them (as well as a couple other tire brands, I am sure). I have done some extensive race and street tire tests as a test driver for Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company (also more recently for Hankook, and Toyo on a smaller level).

The cambered tires didn't seem to work out as well as the engineers would have liked. I think it was one of those things that looked good in concept, but didn't work out to well in the real world or on the race track when the idea was actually implemented.

Not only did the cambered tires require the cars to have very unconventional set-ups to even work, but once the cars were dialed in on the cambered tires, it never felt very good or was beneficial in any way when compared to a conventional made tire of the same compound.