Tire Technology International - March 2024 Issue
Mickey Thompson
Graham Heeps 2024-04-06 14:10:33
Mickey Thompson’s return to its roots in off-road competition is paying dividends for the brand’s street-legal tire development work
Under Goodyear ownership since the takeover of Cooper Tire in 2021, Mickey Thompson Tires is a long way from its founding as an independent, maverick, specialty race tire business in 1963. But through a combination of niche products, motorsport focus and independent management, the brand is keeping the spirit of its founder alive. A planned return to SCORE (Southern California Off Road Enthusiasts) off-road racing – the series founded by Mickey Thompson himself in 1973 – is a fitting next step in an expanding off-road competition presence that has also led to the development of the new street-legal Baja Boss XS tire.
“In 2019 we launched the Baja Boss MT, a traditional mud tire,” explains Ben Anderson, Mickey Thompson’s senior product manager, light truck. “It gained a lot of popularity in off-road spaces. In 2023, Jeremy Jones won the Ultra4 King of the Hammers Every Man Challenge on MTs as well as the Ultra4 Legends National Championship. Jeremy has helped us with feedback on the tire and to learn about the desert and endurance challenges in Ultra4.
“We have also worked with some SCORE race teams, which don’t need DOT-approved tires,” he continues. “The Baja Boss X is our development tire. We have had eight versions of that tire in four years – broadening the traction range in hot and cold temperatures, making it more cut and chip resistant, and so on. We’ve been constantly running it in the field, getting feedback, tweaking it and running it again. We developed a four-ply technology with super-durable sidewalls. It’s very puncture resistant but it’s a very sticky compound – too sticky for the SCORE race teams, who told us it was breaking parts on the car. At the same time, every time we had a flat in Ultra4 racing, it was the sidewall puncture issue.”
"One of the big pieces of feedback that we get from the racers is that the controllability of our products is superior to others. That could be pattern and that could be construction as well. It all works together” Ben Anderson, senior product manager, light truck, Mickey Thompson
Baja Boss XS
As a result of this experience, Mickey Thompson has now combined the Powerply Pro fourply construction from the Baja Boss X with the harder, DOT-certified compound from the Boss MT to create the new Baja Boss XS (X for experimental, S for street legal), which is being offered in 35in, 37in and 40in sizes.
The carcass incorporates polyester plies, steel belts and a nylon overlay. The first ply is biased at an 8° angle. The second and third plies are radial, then the fourth is again biased at 8°.
“If you take an impact to the sidewall with a regular radial tire, it will affect the radial plies in that path,” says Anderson. “But if you have a biased ply overlaid on the radial plies, it spreads that impact to a wider area, lessening the likelihood of a puncture.
“It’s a different way of making it more durable than just adding more material,” he continues. “But [on the Baja Boss XS] we also added a rubber gauge to the mid-to-lower sidewall and found that helps with improved durability as well. It’s a technology we first built for the 40in Baja Boss X.”
Anderson says that by tightening up the carcass, the revised construction will help the vehicle respond more quickly to steering inputs and stabilize more quickly.
“One of the big pieces of feedback that we get from the racers is that the controllability of our products is superior to others out there,” he claims. “That could be pattern and that could be construction as well. It all works together. We think the XS will be a good tire for the Ultra4 racer and for the more extreme enthusiast who maybe wants to drive something to work and back on nice days but also goes wheeling with their club on the weekends.”
Unusually for an off-road truck tire, Mickey Thompson uses a silica-reinforced cap compound in the Baja Boss XS, continuing a precedent set by its AT and MT products.
“It adds a little more cost,” acknowledges Anderson. “But it really helps with wet handling, wet braking and cut and chip resistance, as well as treadwear. There is even some silica in the sticky compound that we use on the Boss X. Not nearly as much, but it does help with the performance of that product.
“We have some extremely intelligent compounders,” he enthuses. “Products like this are a nice break for them, too. They get to sharpen their skills in something off the wall that they would never normally get to do for a mass-market, consumer tire. They like coming up with ideas to test out and try.”
“These products are for legitimizing our brand, developing new technologies and pushing us forward” Ben Anderson, senior product manager, light truck, Mickey Thompson
Production challenge
Putting a tire like the Baja Boss XS into production isn’t the work of a moment, with the plant involved – currently Texarkana, Arkansas – needing to find time between batches of mass-market tires to dedicate to a “super-complicated, short-run, halo tire”, as Anderson puts it.
“We love that our factories are willing to run this stuff because they are not fun to make,” he adds. “You’ve got to switch out a lot of machinery. But they take a lot of pride in making these and in winning in something like Ultra4.
We are fortunate we have so many enthusiasts, whether compounders, engineers, quality or manufacturing folks, within the organization.”
Mickey Thompson tires are produced in other facilities too, as required. For the experimental Boss X, the compound is made in Ohio and then sent to Arkansas, where it has to be used to produce tires within about 30 days. Production runs can be very small for halo products with annual sales as low as single digits for some SKUs, although it’s thought sales of the Baja Boss XS are more likely to be in the hundreds.
"We have some extremely intelligent compounders. They get to sharpen their skills in something off the wall that they would never normally get to do for a mass-market, consumer tire” Ben Anderson, senior product manager, light truck, Mickey Thompson
“These products are for legitimizing our brand, developing new technologies and pushing us forward,” says Anderson. “A lot of the time, we will then mature the technology and adopt it in the mass-market products that most consumers are more likely to use, buy and need.
“They’re definitely not a loss leader. We always make sure that these special projects are profitable, even if they are not in high demand. There’s not a lot of Every Man Ultra4 race teams out there! Our hope for the Boss XS is possibly getting with some SCORE teams to start testing, seeing how this technology deals with SCORE and how we refine it in that space. It’s exciting because Mickey Thompson founded SCORE 50 years ago but we haven’t been participating in SCORE for decades. Now we have a tire that we think would do well. We’re interested to get learnings in a different environment to help us drive innovation further.”
INTEGRATION, AGAIN
Navigating the development environment under new owners When asked where the development work on the Baja Boss XS was done, Mickey Thompson representatives reply with the noncommittal “Ohio”. That’s perhaps no surprise given the reorganization that’s happened since Goodyear bought Cooper Tire – which had owned Mickey Thompson for 18 years – in 2021.
“The good thing is that there’s a lot of enthusiasts in the engineering world who really want to work on our stuff,” says Heather Tausch, Mickey Thompson’s senior director of marketing. “Like all things, it’s been a transition that you have to navigate, and you’ve got to teach everybody how to interact with you. Goodyear’s never had an independently operated business entity before that has remained a wholly owned subsidiary company. There’s a lot of training happening on our side on how to engage with us. But it’s a fun product that people are excited about, so we have that going for us.”
SUBJECTIVE IMPRESSIONS
Real-world feedback from racers is critical to tire development
For an extreme product like the Baja Boss XS, subjective testing by off-road racers such as Jeremy Jones is key to the development process – especially given the repeatability limits of simulating performance on dirt surfaces.
“The racers’ feedback when they get out of that car is one of the best tuning tools that we have,” says Ben Anderson. “In a controlled [tire] testing environment, the cars aren’t on the limit. The racers aren’t hungry, so they’re not pushing and they’re not beating up the tire. We like to work with race teams because they’re the ones that use the newest technology and things pop up that you would never see on a road-use tire. Even if our engineers were to invest in building out an Ultra4 rig like Jeremy’s, just for testing, I don’t think they would beat it up like he has trying to win a race.”
MICKEY THOMPSON MILESTONES
1977
On/off-road tire with tread on the sidewalls
1996
World’s fastest DOT tire
2003
Cooper Tire acquires Mickey Thompson Tires
2004
World’s largest street rod radial tire—Sportsman S/R
2015
First-ever radial drag slick for bracket racers
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Mickey Thompson
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