There’s a surprising amount of guesswork to tread patterns, but tyre makers also rely on a wealth of experience and testing resources.
Ken Avery/Vittoria, Continental, Dave Rome, Caley Fretz, Piper Albrecht
When it comes to treaded tyres, most of us don’t think about much besides pressure and the surface type we’re riding on. It is well understood that there are different tyres for different conditions, with casing, compound, and tread pattern all influencing a tyre’s performance. What is less understood is how these design considerations come into being.
How do tyre makers decide the size of side knobs, the smoothness of the centre tread, or the spacing between blocks of tread? More to the point, why does any of that matter? For those new to cycling, most tyres look the same, and even the fact that tyres are directional isn’t necessarily common knowledge.
Essentially, tyre design attempts to answer this question: How do you turn unpredictable terrain, speed, and rider input into a predictable, optimised tread pattern?
The answer is far from simple. The minutiae of a single knob – its height, orientation and spacing from other knobs, and durometer – can mean the difference between traction and a washout, or speed and sluggishness. Casing construction, rubber compounds, and the challenges of scaling tyres across widths and diameters all add complexity, with each factor needing to be carefully balanced.
There’s also an element of good old human feedback, with pro riders often recruited during the development phase. Here, the ability to accurately articulate the sensations of a tyre into feedback can steer a product’s design.
Equal parts dark art and science
Ken Avery, senior vice president of product development at Vittoria, calls tread design a “dark art,” still sketched on napkins rather than spat out by software. That might sound romantic, or old-fashioned, depending on your view.
Of course, that mystique also helps keep the process opaque, keeping the specifics hidden and consumers reliant on brand authority.
Avery has designed tyres for Vittoria for a decade and, prior to that, spent over a decade in a similar role at Maxxis, where he helped create some of the most recognizable designs on bikes today, and that cumulative experience is essential in the field. “You can’t just go to AI and have it spit out a tread pattern,” Avery explained. Although that isn’t off the table in the future, for the time being, tyre design is a deeply human endeavour.
Explaining what it takes to become a tread pattern designer, Avery said, “You need to have some sort of background or experience to do that because it has to be something that authentically relates to a real rider situation.” For Avery, tyre design is a mix of gut instinct, material science, and rider feedback – a process that still resists being reduced to pure data.
Not that data is unimportant. At tyre giant Continental, the process these days largely begins by looking at its existing products. “You start with what you have; what works and what doesn’t work,” explained Hannah Ferle, road/race product manager at Continental. “We consider customer and athlete feedback to improve each tyre.”
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