You don't fuck with tyres. A tonne and a half of car travelling at the posted highway limit has an awful lot of momentum and a disquieteningly small hold on terra firma, by way of the pissy little contact patch where the rubber meets the road.
Braking, steering and generally Avoiding Shit You Don't Want In Yr Face are aided by acronym-laden techo developments like ABS, DSC, ESP and NDLF (Not Driving Like a Fucktard) but all of the above alphabet soup isn't worth a proud pinch of shit without a decent grasp of terra firma through which to communicate your commandments from the mountain. Yet the number of people who are happy to save a hundred or so bucks a set by strapping on Happy Mile Golden Shower POQ70s instead of something recognisably decent is always alarming. It ain't just badge wank either, although there's a lot of that in the tyre market - the El Cheapo fly-by-nighters always end up wayyy down the bottom of the consumer and motoring mag tyre tests, often overshooting market averages for wet braking distances, roadholding etc by astonishing, often dangerous orders of magnitude.Then again I did have a mate from my honours class who actively sought that end of the performance envelope out of shitty tyres. This was my man Bomber, an older bloke, by which I mean he was 28 and we were 21, who made a packet modelling in Europe and was having a bash at being a scientist and being taken seriously on an intellectual basis, in between banging the arse off a series of girls from his current modelling agency - interesting bloke, remind me to tell you about him someday. Anyway he'd bought a shitbox Hyundai Excel straight off the rack (without even a test drive!) as a disposable shopping trolley back when they cost fuck-all drive-away in the late '90s and made it his mission in life to kill it. He drove the thing until the tyres were balder than the Minister for the Environment, then actively sought out wet days and slippery roundabouts for his own entertainment. In his defence it's hard to find extreme sports in that part of Sydney on a wet Tuesday, short of dropping in on the Bra Boys off Maroubra point.
Bomber had done a bit of racing as a youngster - his folks were cashed up Italian industrialists who picked the rise of the Red Brigades in the '80s as a good opportunity to GTFO - so his was wilful ignorance, he knew about tyres (basically he was making his own DIY scuffed slicks, or as near as you can get from a pair of Kumho Powerstars worn to the belts.) So his is a special case. For anyone else, you'd reckon all of that shit about tyres being kinda important was fairly obvious information, yeah? Particularly if you happened to, I dunno, sell tyres for a living?
Apparently not.
I was Tabitha's replacement in Chateau Dodgy One, or whatever it was called before I moved up to Brisvegas, if it was called anything other than 'Craig and Tabitha's Place'. (Craigos, flatmate of status most legendary, you will recall from Previous Iterations O' This Shit.) Tabitha wasn't called Tabitha cos it's not actually her name, but we'll use that for the purposes of this account - the following is a true story, only the names have been changed to protect the guilty. Tabitha's departure from what became Chateau Dodgy I was for a half-year OE to the UK - mostly Wales, where her bloodlines originated, which explained her dark hair, fair skin and feisty temperament. It didn't explain her enormous boobies but those, to be fair, defied explanation, and gravity, and containment, and a bunch of other things. Being her replacement, I heard all about Tabi long before I actually met her, from the stack of mutual friends I inherited along with her room and her flatmates. Her better half, Jack - that WAS his real name, kind of, but now isn't - it's a long story, and a shit one - struggled manfully with the day-to-day anguish and frustration of the long-term relationship thing. Mind you as it turned out he was pretty much the same when she came back - he was anguished and frustrated mainly because he wanted to bang the arse off pretty much every girl in a five mile vicinity and wasn't able to. We felt his pain. To be fair that was about as much of him as we ever wanted to feel.
Tabi did have her less appealing points. Hairy arms. Short temper, particularly after a half-dozen Red Bull and Vodka, which was probably why she didn't drink much. Medieval society friends who dulled the fuck out of our house parties, or at least the early evenings thereof until darkness fell and the firetwirlers started torching their floaty fucking outfits. And, above all, she was from Fucken Woombie Land. Brad the Cock - the original and still the greatest - was an ex of hers from Up There. In that he thought he was an ex and she thought he was an embarrassing friend from school. We thought he was a cock and invented Brad Cock Theory to explain it (Brad Cock Theory being that everyone called Brad is a cock. Everyone we knew called Brad was a cock, as was Brad Pitt and Brad Fittler - ergo it is written, QED.) Her family were still up there - her old man ran an industrial tyre business, fitting trucks, tractors, farm machinery etc.
Tabi's conveyance for missions back to see the fam, as well as her shopping trolley for St Lucia And Surrounds,
was a fairly dodgy mid-90s Magna station wagon with the pretty-much-rubbish 2.6 litre 'Astron' four - previously encountered in the extremely shit '80s Magna which old Hovelmate Jase bought in Sydney (my first and only FAIL in helping mates purchase pre-loved motors), which lasted maybe a month and a half before grenading itself on the Princes Highway near Hurstville, occasioning a broadside handbrake stop and full Chinese fire drill across multiple lanes of peak hour traffic. The mill in Tabi's later variant wasn't a shitload better, rattling like an emphysemic lung and seeming functionally challenged by even the mildest of St Lucia's hills, let along attacking same with a bootful of Tabi's guinea pig hutch. (Intended for Tabi's guinea pigs, not for Tabi. She was into some kinky shit but being tied up in a bunny hutch didn't appear to be part of the equation, at least not that her or Jack would admit to.)And the old man had seen fit to shoe his only daughter's pride and joy with Cheng Shin tyres.
Cheng Shin make tyres for bicycles. There's a lot of bicycles in China. I'm sure, for the parameters of longevity, roadholding and wet-weather grip that pedalling a deadly treadly about the place in Maoland, Cheng Shin make perfectly acceptable tyres for that purpose. They make some desperately fucking ordinary tyres for full-sized cars, however.
We went down to the Gold Coast on the piss quite regularly in those days. Moff was still based out of his folks' palatial digs in Trashmore - tennis court, pool table, endless beer fridge capacity - and many a weekend of the early years of this decade was spent around the pool table, drinking beers and sledging the Christ out of each other's increasingly poor work with the cue, prior to heading into town and arguing about which bars or clubs we least wanted to go to.
Shooters FTW, in that respect. Melbas FTP. O'Malleys we liked, at least until management stopped liking us. Surfers Beergarden... well we ended up spending so many fucking nights in that joint when AJ's band started getting gigs there, it kinda grew on us. As did the buckets of ice-cold Corona and the fifty million big screens showing every sporting event on the globe at once.So t'was the morning after the night before. Jack had been able to fineagle the use of the Guinea Pig Mobile from his better half - she had exams or something and had stayed back in Brisvegas, though probably just to avoid the mess of a boys' weekend on the Goldie, and fair enough too - and had conveyanced us down the shambles of roadworks and limited speed zones that was the M1-under-construction. Heads full of fog, we'd made a run on the local Maccas for breakfast - which was fucking MILES away - and were on our return to Moff HQ.
Trashmore's characterised by a sea of stupid curly streets, none of which are straight, meet up or make sense, as per housing developments of the 70s in that part of the Goldie. Lying between the criss-crossing arterials like plates of spaghetti on a large chequerboard tablecloth, they squiggle up and down the gentle rolling hills of the developments, ensnaring lost tourists forever in their maze-like complexities. Luckily we had locals on board. Well one, anyway, who as usual was a-hurtin' the most courtesy an unwise decision to switch to bourbon somewhere between midnight and sunrise. The road back to his involved a roundabout at the top of a hill, then descending to a sharpish left-turn at the bottom, which fed into the a street which eventually led to Moff's.
Now, Jack was fucking about, of that let there be no question. He was caning the bejesus out of the heaving old Magna wagon, and had been loudly proposing a blazing handbrake turn at the end of the cul-de-sac where Moff's familial palace sat. Anyway, long story short, he pitched into the sharpish left at the bottom of the hill with a bit too much gusto for the conditions. Nothing the Brown Hornet wouldn't shake off with a bit of body roll and maybe a wag of the tail. The Hornet was running Goodyear Eagle NCTs. Not brilliant tyres, but as good as I could afford.
The Guinea Pig Mobile, though, was running Cheng Shins. It never even looked like making the turn. Not even remotely. With all its wheels instantaneously locked - even the spare, I'm pretty certain - the Magna ploughed straight through the turn, bounced high and hard off the traffic island, vaulting it like a steeplechase horse and flattening the rather optimistic 'Keep Left' sign. When an ashen-faced Jack finally gathered the Magna and himself up, he was on the nature strip on the other side of the world, there were now grainy dark-grey tyremarks looping from corner entry to exit, five matching pucker-marks in the Magna's upholstery, and a fist-sized blister protruding hideously from the sidewall of the now-unusable tyre which had taken the brunt of the hit.We couldn't believe our luck. We couldn't believe our arsiness. We couldn't believe how much shit Jack was going to get in when Tabi found out. And most of all, we couldn't believe anyone could ever be as fucking tight-arsedly fucktardish to fit ANY motor vehicle with tyres made from vulcanised bicycles and political dissidents*, let alone one driven by your Only Frigging Daughter. Letting her date Jack was bad enough, without sending the Cheng Shin minions of death after her...
And the turn from Cotlew onto Yangoora was forever to be known, from that day forth, as Cheng Shin Corner.
Tyres, people. Don't fuck with them.
The old man does a lot of mileage in his ex-copper BAII Falcon - lots of missions down the Pacific Highway to see his mum in Sydney - and Falcons, of course, have a reputation for chewing through tyres like Jesse Ryder chews through pies, and dropping out of alignment faster than Courtney Love's legs. They always have, since the 80s, and since the advent of the control-arm independent rear on the BA the problem hasn't gone away, instead doubled. Running 16" ex-copper pursuit rims means he's stuck using specific tyre sizes as well. He's sick of paying elephant bucks for OEM Goodyears, experimented with Bridgestones and Toyos and is fairly over the entire experience. On our weekly phone yarn - usually encompassing a lot of talk about car shit - he mentioned he'd burned through another set of fronts with all the abrasive Sydney driving he was doing, and was eyeing off a set of these Maxxis tyres that apparently went quite well.
Maxxis? All I knew about them was them sponsoring some US motocross races I'd seen on LESBN but I had a vague feeling they were dodgy, couldn't remember why. Did a mate have them or something, or was I just being a label bitch for the big rubber corporates with a higher profile in racing?
So, while I was talking to the old man, I fired up the steam-powered MacBook and punched 'Maxxis' into Google. Which ummed and aahed, and redirected to:
Cheng Shin Rubber
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Maxxis)
Hmmm.
"You should be right," I told him.
"So long as you don't come across any corners."
The Doctor is OUT.
* Cheng Shin are actually Taiwanese, but don't let that get in the way of some cheap ethnic stereotyping. I know I didn't.
11 comments:
wow you can tell a tale Doc
Yes! I have ridden a roadbike with Cheng Shin "Barracudas" no less!
Scary exercise!
U - cheers mate, unless the translation 'get to the fucking point already Doc' - yeah I know, I know. If it's any consolation I talk like I write, so if I was telling you this story in person I'd have finished it in about five minutes.
Drej - I can believe it. I probably would have sought out somewhere with an appropriate number of corners to suitably test the new rubber, eg the Nullabor.
Top stuff Dr Y! So this advice you gave your old man is obviously some payback for when he told you stuff such as "Light beer is okay", or "there's no difference between Kentucky Gold and Jack Daniels" or "Home brand pies taste just as good as those ones from the bakery".
Nice one.
Nah the old man would never have spoken blasphemous mistruths of such an abominable nature in my hearing. Particularly ref. low alcohol beer. Though he did claim that both Reschs Real AND Tooheys Red were appropriate substitutes for actual drinkable beer - though I long figured this was in fact an ingenious tactic designed to limit teenage drinking by only stocking beer that was by definition on the very marginal cusp of being drinkable - and he's owned a lot of Falcons, despite every one of them being shit, indicating he's somewhat unwell in the head.
Tooheys Red - there were guys used to buy cases of 30 cans of the stuff to take to parties then drink everyone else's VB or Tooheys New. Way, way, way against the Laws of the Brotherhood. No more invites for those arse clowns.
I remember when Red and Real were in the realms of $20 a carton - less than a case of New throwdowns - which made the whole experience somewhat more excusable. One Red-fuelled Triple J Hottest 100 (might have been Aust Day 1999?) at the Hovel springs to mind - two cartons of Red, six hours of drinking, many years of regret. And to think we turned up our nose at Tasman Bitter (Boags Original in its homeland) which was even cheaper and quite a bit less fucking nasty.
I well remember the Tasman Bitter. It was quite drinkable, particularly on a hot day with the Brisbane Test beating out Warney's rat-a-tat-tat against the Poms. One of those series when the losing captain had to say after each Test "Well we still have another Test next week and we'll look at where we went wrong and hopefully play good cricket and win." Hussein, the bloody dill, after sending Australia in on the first day and losing by a gazillion squared.
Sadly Nasser was the one commentating when the team entered by Cricket Australia that at the time purported to carry the hopes and dreams of aforesaid nation fell over so spectacularly against Sri Lanka. He's a choad. I hope his balls drop off.
Did that poor young model get run over by a quadrunner?
And interesting theory about Brads. I have an older brother named Brad. And, he's kind of a cock.
Mate, I AM EXACTLY THE SAME!. you have fuck all rubber keeping you on the road and its not worth the risk..EVER.
The best tyres I have ever fitted were on the VT SS, they were thesame as what she came out with. Bridgestone B530 sport tyres. WICKED, but you would only get 40K outta them and they are still at nearly 300 a pop. before they changed the pattern, the Original Directional DUCAROs by dunlop were the ducks guts at a great price.
Now i have discovered that because all the young fellas almost immediately tradein their 17's for bigger rims and new tyres, the market is flush with 90% tread left 17's at the moment and you can get these for 100 dollars each in full sets. AND i mean in perfect fucking condition. Although brand new 17's are only 150 each and thats good quality gear as well, its 200 smackers in ya pocket with the 90% jobbies. but it pays to know what you are looking for too, just to be safe, some dodge fucking tyres dealers in the second hand market out there.
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