We recently published an article about why slick racing tyres are not suitable for public roads. We feel that it is necessary to also explain what they are.

Read: https://gomoto.com.my/blogs/articles/5-facts-why-slick-racing-tyres-are-unsuitable-for-the-road

The place to start is with road tyres.

What are the grooves in road tyres for?

The grooves in your tyres act as channels to evacuate water away from the contact patch of the tyres.

With the grooves cut (as in moulded) into the tyre, the rubber portions form certain tread patterns and the rubber parts are called " tread blocks." The bigger the blocks, the more rubber is put on the road, increasing the tyre's contact patch. Manufacturers strike a balance between how many grooves and the sizes of the blocks, for different applications such as sport riding, sport-touring, general use, off-road or part-off-road.

However, the leading edges of these blocks tend to overheat when ridden at high loads i.e. high speeds, hard acceleration, hard braking, big angle cornering.

Also, the grooves interrupt the tyre from providing a continuous footprint. The best way to demonstrate this is trying to cornering hard on off-road tyres.

Enter the slick racing tyre

The slick racing tyre has no grooves in order to do one thing: Provide a continuous and maximum possible contact patch for maximum traction - on a dry track.

With maximum traction, acceleration, braking, steering and cornering potentials can be realised.

However, as we mentioned earlier, there are many caveats to using slicks on the road (even on track), so it is best that we stick to road-specific tyres.