#Michelin

Cruiser riders want what the rest of us want, don’t they? Round black pneumatic tires that hold air, provide good traction in the wet and dry while providing a smooth quiet ride. Yes, they want those things, and they also want a tire that produces orange smoke when lit off. Otherwise, we’re all one big happy family. Where sport and touring bikes have mostly settled on 17-inch diameters front and rear, with usually a 3.5-inch front and a 5- or 6-inch wide rear wheel, cruisers are less standardized. And where sportbike riders will overlook a little harshness for the sake of handling and grip, cruiser riders tend to be more concerned with ride comfort and long life. Since tire engineers aren’t having to deal with 150-mph-plus top speeds, they’re able to give it to them. Looks are important too. Buying decisions can be heavily influenced by tread pattern, and cruiser riders are swayed by whitewalls and crazy-wide rears on their choppers. Luckily, there’s a tire for every rear. Let’s try to keep it in some semblance of alphabetical order, shall we? (The orange smoker starts with an “S.”)

Well, you learn something new every day. In this case, the “you” would be me and my use of the word sipe. I’ve been using it for years to mean the grooves in a tire’s tread pattern. (Several online dictionaries, the one built in to my laptop’s OS, and the dictionary of record, the Oxford English Dictionary, confirm this by saying “a groove or channel in the tread of a tire to improve its grip.” But I digress.) What prompted this discovery was a statement made at the beginning of the press briefing for Michelin’s introduction of the Pilot Road 4 tire. To wit: “The Michelin Pilot Road 3 was the first [motorcycle] tyre with sipes.” To think that I’d been using the word since before the PR3 was introduced.