  ven before the first half of the year is over, the 2006 MotoGP World Championship is already a season to remember. While five-time defending world champion Valentino Rossi won the second race of the year, his usual dominance was missing. Meanwhile young lions like Nicky Hayden, Marco Melandri and Dani Pedrosa grabbed the early-season headlines. Also making 2006 noteworthy is that this will be the last year for 990cc engines before a 190cc displacement reduction trims the bikes’ horsepower, so the 2006 campaign puts riders at the reins of the most powerful engines ever seen in bike racing. Thus tires will be more important than ever, and Michelin is determined to maintain its supremacy in the class, as it aims for a 15th consecutive world championship. “This will be a very interesting and important season,” said Nicolas Goubert, Michelin’s director of motorcycle racing. “Beginning in 2007 MotoGP bikes will be 800cc, so the engines may not be as powerful for the next two or three seasons. This means that tires will be particularly important this year, especially since we can expect fierce competition from our two rivals.” Michelin’s dedicated crew of MotoGP engineers and chemists spend 12 months a year researching, developing, testing and racing tires for the latest generation of 250-horsepower MotoGP bikes. Building tires for bikes that operate at the absolute limits of adhesion, piloted by the world’s best riders, enables Michelin to create exceptional street tires, offering superb grip, endurance and handling. “During the winter we focused on the rear tire to give riders more edge grip and traction for more mid-corner and acceleration performance,” Goubert continued. “Our 2006 rear tire features a different construction to provide a larger footprint during cornering. We have also done some work on front construction, to give our new riders like Dani Pedrosa (Repsol Honda-Michelin) and Casey Stoner (LCR Honda-Michelin) more confidence on corner entry.”
Indeed, Michelin has been experimenting with wider-profile front tires since last season. Nicky Hayden (Repsol Honda-Michelin) used a wide front to utterly dominate the 2005 U.S. Grand Prix at Laguna Seca, while Melandri (Fortuna Honda-Michelin) won at Istanbul, Turkey, and Valencia, Spain, using a similar tire. Not all Michelin riders adopted the new front tire last year, though, and Rossi (Camel Yamaha-Michelin) even held out for the old-style front until the fourth race of 2006. “Valentino was still happy with the narrower tire because he’s won so many races with it,” Goubert revealed. “Over the winter we improved the tire with a new construction and now everyone uses it. This tire has a slightly wider and slightly taller profile to give a larger contact patch on corner entry, so riders can brake harder and deeper into corners. It’s a logical development, considering that we have been creating rear tires with a larger contact patch for the last few seasons.” In fact, Michelin was working on increasing the rear tires’ contact area even before the fire-breathing four-stroke MotoGP bikes debuted in 2002. Michelin’s 16.5-inch rear slicks dominated the final few seasons of 500cc GP racing. Compared to Michelin’s 17-inch rear, which had been the tire of choice since the mid-80s, the original 16.5 delivered a larger footprint at maximum lean for better grip, cooler running and improved endurance. This concept of increasing grip at high angles of lean transformed the final few years of 500 GPs, allowing riders to get on the throttle harder and sooner, contributing to a major improvement in lap times. And the tire’s longer-lasting grip was responsible for a dramatic increase in race pace. The arrival of the new MotoGP bikes only increased demands on tires, especially at high lean angles when the four-strokes deliver substantially more torque and power. The original Michelin S4 rear tire (‘S’ for slick, ‘4’ for four-stroke) had a different profile and larger diameter compared to the 500cc 16.5-inch tire, in order to provide a lower operating temperature, more sidegrip for improved mid-corner performance, extra traction for quicker corner-exit acceleration and better feel for maximum rider confidence. Like every Michelin tire, the S4 was designed to achieve the optimum in the five vital areas of tire performance: grip, endurance, consistency, rider feel and handling. Over the past few seasons, new versions of the S4, with modified profiles and constructions, have been created to further enhance cornering performance. Last year’s version used a new construction to deliver even more sidegrip and an even bigger contact patch for more acceleration traction. The S4 has proved dominant in virtually all conditions, from searing heat to soaking rain, despite determined opposition from two other tire brands. In the four-plus seasons since competition among tire companies resumed in MotoGP, Michelin has won 65 of 70 races and every world championship. Through the first five Grands Prix of 2006, Michelin riders occupied seven of the first eight places in the points chase, led by Hayden. The overall performance of Michelin’s MotoGP tires is the key to their success but logistics are also crucial in the quest for victory. Michelin provides tires for a total of 18 bikes for nine riders at each round of the 17-race World Championship. This involves transporting about 1100 tires to each GP, 40 percent of which are front tires, and 60 percent rears. About 10 percent are rain tires. The total number increases during back-to-back races, when Michelin’s MotoGP convoy doesn’t have time to return to its base in Clermont-Ferrand, France. For races outside of Europe, tires are shipped via air to each circuit. Michelin flies seven to eight tons of freight to these overseas races.
To protect Michelin’s proprietary technology, tight security is always maintained while the race tires are outside the Clermont-Ferrand facility. Trackside service trucks travel in convoys and are never left unattended. If they make an overnight stop, drivers sleep in their trucks, which are also equipped with alarms. Each tire is marked with a unique barcode to ensure that every tire brought to the track leaves in a Michelin truck at the end of the weekend. (Sponsored teams are provided with standard production Michelin slicks to use while their bikes are in transit.) Michelin’s nine riders generally consume 400 to 500 tires during a GP weekend. The other 700 tires allow Michelin to respond to all track and weather conditions. But if even that surplus inventory does not provide the ideal solution for a particular circuit, Michelin has an ace up its sleeve in the form of the highly secretive and exclusive C3M production process. C3M (which stands for carcasse, monofil, moulage et mechanique) produces tires in a single step, instead of the seven used in conventional tire production. It’s used for MotoGP tires as well as for certain high-performance tires that are available to the general public, like the Michelin Power Race. Details about the process are hard to come by, and Michelin personnel quickly change the subject when pressed about C3M. What is known is that C3M allows Michelin to be highly reactive. For example, during the 2004 Valencia GP weekend, trackside engineers speculated that a certain combination of tire construction and compound would perform better than the tires that were brought to the circuit. Thanks to C3M, Michelin was able to produce alternative tires at the factory on the Friday before the race. These were shipped overnight to the Spanish circuit, where Michelin riders went on to monopolize the podium. Such quick turnaround would have been impossible using traditional production techniques. C3M is just one in a long line of Michelin innovations that have found their way from the racetrack to the consumer. In 1983, Honda’s Freddie Spencer won the 500cc GP World Championship, the first for Michelin radial tires. Four years later, Michelin revolutionized the motorcycle industry by introducing the first-ever radial tires for the street. At the rain-soaked 1992 Japanese GP, Honda’s Mick Doohan won on Michelin rain tires that incorporated an innovative silica-charged rubber mix. In 1999, Michelin launched its silica technology in a street tire, the Pilot Sport. Michelin has used two-compound technology (2CT) in Grand Prix racing since 1994. Last year, Michelin debuted the Power Race, its first street-legal tire with 2CT. Michelin’s vast research and development capabilities help the company stay one step ahead of its rivals, both on and off the track. The company devotes 4.3% of its annual revenue to R&D, well above the 3% spent by its closest competitor. This focus on ongoing development pays handsome benefits, not just in racing, but for street riders as well. For example, Pilot Power performance tires, which were launched in 2004, include components used in 2002 MotoGP tires known as MRSE – short for Michelin Racing Synthetic Elastomers – which significantly reduce the time required for the tire to get to its ideal working temperature. Similarly, the MMC (Macro Molecular Compound) was a plasticizer used in MotoGP racing in 2003 before being incorporated into Pilot Power tires. No one but Michelin can obtain these substances for the simple reason that they are produced only at Michelin’s factory in Bassens, France. Technology transfer from MotoGP to road tires is a global strategic objective for Michelin and doesn’t stop with sportbike tires. Michelin Pilot Road sport touring tires incorporate a silica-based rubber mix with a view toward enhancing grip on wet roads for riders who rely on their bikes for everyday transportation. Likewise the new Pilot GT tire for the Honda GL1500 Gold Wing employs a rubber mix containing the HTSC (High Tech Synthetic Compound) plasticizer, which was first used in Michelin MotoGP tires in 2003. From the very first Michelin racing slicks that Jack Findlay rode at the Isle of Man in 1974 to the latest Michelin MotoGP tires that have carried Valentino Rossi to five consecutive world championships, Michelin has been at the forefront of performance tire technology for more than 30 years. As Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Edouard Michelin has said, “Competition is part of Michelin’s philosophy – we want to earn our reputation through the excellence of our product. That is what stimulates us.”      ichelin claimed a unique and unprecedented quartet of racing titles in 2005, earning the champion’s laurels in MotoGP, Formula One, the World Rally Championship and the Le Mans 24-Hour race. While some tire companies are content to compete in series where they face little or no opposition, Michelin swept the world’s most important championships while competing directly with its biggest rivals.“We’re absolutely thrilled to have won so many prestigious titles in 2005,” said Edouard Michelin, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. “We’re also delighted to have demonstrated throughout the season, regardless of the event, that Michelin tires were instrumental in boosting user performance by giving them a greater chance of winning. Racing is a fantastic testing and learning ground that delivers long-term benefits to all our customers.” Despite the obvious differences in MotoGP, F1 and WRC tires, success in one discipline can pay dividends in others – and ultimately to consumers – thanks to the pooling of resources from different departments within Michelin. For example, Michelin has a single chemistry department that works with all forms of racing, instead of assigning chemists to specific types of tires. An illustration of how this synergy works across product lines is found in the use of silica-based rubber compounds, which were initially tested in four-wheel motorsports before being applied to motorcycle racing, and ultimately to production tires like the Pilot Road.  Fernando Alonso and Valentino Rossi, both world champions on Michelin tires. |
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Nicolas Goubert, Michelin’s director of motorcycle racing. 
