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Porsche Club of America
The Northeast Region

By Bruce Corwin, Bruce968@PorscheNet.com
NOR'EASTER Online - October 2000

There has been quite a bit of discussion lately about tire failures. We're all very familiar now with the Firestone crisis. Latest word is that the death toll now stands at 103 with injuries over 400. Although I wonder what proof there is that all of those were caused by tire defects. If somebody crashes and dies, it wouldn't seem too unlikely that the surviving family may want to put the blame on Firestone and hope to collect big bucks.

There's another tire failure situation though that hits a little closer to home for many PCA members. It has to do with Kumho competition tires. Rick Hetherington of Autobahn Performance notes that three of his customers have had these tires fail at the track. The problem has to do with the tire tread layer delaminating from the underlying layers. Steve Bader and Scott Astrofsky had their tires fail to a lesser degree, but George Markley's came apart to such an extent that he could actually slide his hand between the tread layer and the underlying layers. The problem seems not too widespread so far. Jerry Pellegrino with EPE was not aware of any failures on his customer's cars. Kevin Saltzman of Randolph Associates knew of one customer with this problem.

According to Rudy Consolacion, Senior Engineer of Motorsports at the Kumho Technical Center in Akron Ohio, there is something important you should know before using the Kumho Victoracer at the track. He says that these tires can be used off the shelf for street driving, autocross or as a rain tire. For dry track conditions, the tire must be shaved and heat cycled first! He says the problem is that with too much tread depth, you get "tread squirm" which creates excessive heat and causes the tire to fail. You can contact Rudy at 330-283-0868.

Rudy also said that dealers selling these tires are supposed to inform you of this problem. I put in a call to Tire Rack and asked about the need to shave or heat cycle Kumho Victoracers. The salesman said shaving and heat cycling was not necessary. So somehow this crucial bit of information is not getting to the sales force, which in turn, puts the customer in peril.

Kumho is a Korean tire company. I checked their website (kumhotire.com) for helpful information but found none. What I did find though was really funny! Here's part of their advice (I swear I'm not making this up! And it's not my typing either. I copied and pasted this directly from the website.) "The hurtled tire can be ruptured during operating. It you drive on the condition gotten stuck different materials like stone Etna in the tread groove, or tire gotten stuck nail, tire can be puked or ruptured. You have to change into new tire in case of having danger that damage might arrive to the Carcass."

In other news, with the SUV joint venture going well so far between Porsche and VW, there is now a rumor that the two companies might jointly develop a new entry-level Porsche based on the VW Beetle / Audi TT platform. The expectation would be for the car to use VW's 1.8 liter turbo inline-4 and the cost to be about $30,000.

Porsche Club of America The Northeast Region

Porsche Club of America
The Northeast Region