Tires may all be black, round, and good for driving down a road, but beyond that, different tires are less alike than most people realize. Specialty vehicles like the Bugatti Chiron Super Sport 300+ need purpose-built tires reinforced with carbon fiber in order to crack 300 mph. Yet even those tires, despite costing thousands of dollars per corner, are only guaranteed safe up to a certain speed. What happens when you push a tire past that—way past that—like, beyond the sound barrier?
Russian YouTube channel Garage 54 figured it’d find out, which it did by building a custom rig to spin wheels at extreme speeds. The testing rig is assembled from a 2.5-liter Toyota V6 producing about 200 horsepower and 180 pound-feet of torque, which travel through an automatic transmission to a modified differential from a minivan. With an electronic throttle actuator installed to allow remote operation for safety’s sake, the rig was ready for testing.
Tire approaching the speed of sound
Garage 54 took its creation to a nearby shooting range, where it mounted a 235/40R18 tire with the second-highest speed rating, Y, indicating tolerance of speeds up to 186 mph. Because early tests indicated the tire would warp enough at high speed to de-bead itself, they stuffed it with an inner tube to maintain its shape. Once installed, they ran the rig through its paces, achieving a maximum indicated output speed of 10,437 rpm before the tire exploded so quickly that even the slow-mo cameras couldn’t catch more than a frame of its carcass flying off-screen.
Given that tire size’s 79.8-inch circumference, we calculate that it reached a maximum road speed of 789 mph. While the speed of sound varies with altitude and temperature, it generally falls in the mid-upper 700s near sea level. So yes, they indeed broke the sonic barrier with a tire.
Their math, however, indicates a top speed of 1,332 kph, or 828 mph—they might have recorded a higher speed than shown on camera, or accounted for tire deformation that increased top speed. Whatever the true speed, we don’t disagree that they sent a tire supersonic, and in the process no doubt made the ghost of Chuck Yeager proud.
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