When you're developing a new UTV tire, one that's meant to hold up to all the pitfalls and perils drivers encounter out on the trails, you definitely want to engineer something that'll hold up. But when you want to make sure that all your engineering was worth the price of admission, you want to hand it over to someone who treats their machines with careless abandon.
You want to hand it over to "Wonder Boy" Travis Pastrana.
And that's exactly what Yokohama did with its brand-new Geolander MT side-by-side tires. They even hand-delivered the tires to Travis at Pastranaland where, as you'd expect, Travis and Co. put the tires through the sort of hell you can only find at his home compound.
Did you expect anything else?
Now, when normal humans and engineers test new tires, they go to tracks or trails and put those tires through a prescribed series of very meticulous tests. Weather-related tests, deflection tests, durability tests as in putting them on a long-term dyno to see how many miles they can withstand, that sort of thing. But when you give a set of tires to Travis Pastrana, he does...other things.
As you can see in the video above, he comes out of the compound's massive garage wheelie-ing his race-spec Can-Am Maverick X3 and immediately goes into a tire-smoking drift and donut. The tire's are so grippy, however, they're actually causing the Can-Am's rear to hop. That's incredibly impressive since I can literally light up my BFGs with the faintests of breaths on my X3's throttle.
Then it's on to jumps. Multiple. And jumps with turns. What's this test? Well, according to Travis, it tests sidewall stiffness and durability, as if you can go from jump to turn all in one fell swoop and not flip, that's a helluva tire. Whether that's an accurate test, I'll let you all be the judge of that. I will say, I'm with Travis, as you definitely want a tire that'll bite hard enough to keep you turning and not flip you over the side.
And there's more tests to be had, because the tires aren't dead. They're still a-tickin. But I won't spoil the rest of the video and I'm more than interested in Yokohama's new UTV tire. Hopefully, I can score a set and put them to my own tests over the next few months. Hey, Yokohama, hit me up. Let's see how I like them compared to my BFGs.
