A whole new kind of DIY....


26th of March, 2007..... neo-buggy places a large image advertising a Medial Pro tyre competition. Interested I click the image and I am taken onto the Medial Pro website. And this is what it said:

"Participate in the International Medial Pro Tyre Design Challenge!
The winning entry will first of all receive one racing season’s worth of Medial Pro tyres, and the winning tyre design will be named after the winner! "

Well, for me this is the dream competition! So I set off designing my tyre straight away.
        

Firstly I had to do my research and make some key decisions. Firstly I considered what tyres Medial Pro already make and where there is a gap in the market. I decided this gap was in the block section. My local tracks and other tracks I travel to throughout the country work very well with block tread tyres. These are also very popular on the North American tracks and generally throughout the world where you will commonly see a set of Pro-Line Crime Fighters, GRP Jollys, Panther Komodo Dragons etc in every racers tyre collection.

Once decided on a block tread pattern I need to consider aspects such as radius of certain parts, the actual specific tread pattern and of course thickness of certain parts of the tyre. Fortunately I had some tyres I could use for research so I cut these apart to see roughly what sizes they use for a background research. Further to this I went to the university library and found a few good books on tyre design which helped me further still.


  

Using knowledge gained from racing on what works well, and using knowledge gained from the literature I designed the tread pattern as seen above. I designed this in a 2D CAD package as it allowed me easily manipulate and accurately draw different designs. The above design took some modification from my original idea to arrive at what it is now. The radius of certain parts of the tyre effects the overall surface contact area, cornering and how the tyre handles and distributes forces. Therefore a fairly flat top radius was chosen to allow good contact area as best work with the block style tread.
  

The individual blocks were one of the more tricky parts to design. As can be seen above, all blocks have a vertical taper. This helps along with the tyres elastic effect, to grip the surface better.

The red triangle tread is one of the more unique features of the tyre which allow a certain condition very beneficial to the handling. Tyres which have the tread run right to the edge can sometimes suffer with side-bite issue in grip. Therefore having a triangle pointing outwards means the surface area reduces as you move closer to the edge, this in turn helps side bite issues. Also having the tread on the outer row at a high angle also really helps the tyres in cornering.

The blue blocks are 6 sided with a narrowing but blunt end. The reasoning for my choice in the 3 end block is quite complex. If I continued the standard green block across the whole row it would place a block in the centre of the tyre. However if you have a block in the centre of the tyre it makes it difficult for any loose dirt to move in between the blocks. Having the blocks clog would be bad for grip. Therefore I decided against a single block in the center of the tyre. However simply just removing the centre block would leave a large gap in the centre of the tyre, this would be bad for grip. As a result I designed the blue block as it extends towards the centre of the tyre, increasing contact area and improving grip, however it allows a good gap in the middle of the tyre to allow the dirt to clear.

Once I had designed in the 2D CAD package I exported to a Vector graphics program (of which I have limited knowledge, hence not perfect PDF files) to create the full PDF design below. You can also see my PDF reference letter which quickly summarises the design.