Rennie Scaysbrook | March 9, 2017
Have tire, will travel.
That’s what Dunlop is hoping for its riders with the brand new RoadSmart III sport touring hoops. In a segment dominated by Michelin and its excellent Pilot Road 4 GT, Dunlop is hoping to lure more riders onto the yellow and black brand by giving them more tire over a longer life than the equivalent blue Michelins, better wet weather grip and a lower level of performance drop across the life of the tire, something that should appease the long distance riders out there as well as the occasional canyon carver.
Dunlop used the Michelin rubber as a yard stick when creating the new RoadSmart III, aiming to not just beat but pretty much dominate it across a series of tests conducted by an independent company (Texas Test Fleet) that focused mainly on tire longevity.
“Performance touring is the hardest segment to engineer a product for because for sport tires you want sporty performance, grip and handling, and touring tires you want mileage,” says Dunlop’s Product and Marketing manager, Mike Manning. “We did testing with ours and competitor tires that have 3000-5000 miles on them. That was one of our goals to have the most mileage and have better handling over time, and that’s what we ended up with.”
The RoadSmart III’s Multi-Tread compound construction (harder in the center, softer in the sidewalls) was examined to give lighter handling, better shock absorption and of course, longer mileage to not just the Michelin but also the outgoing RoadSmart II tires. Part of this came down to altering the layout of the steel belts that wrap around the tire’s circumference.
“Altering the cable design helps reduce the amount of shock transmitted into the tire and thus the rider,” says Dunlop’s Road Smart III Project leader, Sean Bell. “Using Dunlop’s Jointless Belt Construction we can easily vary the lining of the cable, and that gives it a better damping characteristic and a lower wear rate over the life of the tire. The difference between RoadSmart II and RoadSmart III is we have longer polymer chains and that allows the compound to bind to itself better. It makes the compound more durable without losing the grip that we all are familiar with.”
The most obvious change to the tire is the look, with the number of tread grooves increased substantially over the outgoing RoadSmart II thanks to Dunlop’s cross grove tread pattern, designed to help disperse more water from underneath the tire.
Thousands and thousands of miles were logged at the Dunlop Proving Grounds in Huntsville, Alabama, during the development of the RoadSmart III with Senior Test Engineer, Rich Conicelli. Rich is a human computer who can tell you what tire he’s on within seconds, take it to its limit and keep it there for hours, and he came back reporting a three second improvement when riding a BMW R 1200 RT around a 40 second wet track at the Huntsville Proving Grounds versus the Michelin Pilot Road 4 GT, which is a seriously impressive gain.
“We conducted those tests on worn tires, with 9000 miles each on them,” Conicelli says. “The idea was the performance wouldn’t drop off at anything like the rate of the competitor, which has an excellent tire. You only ride on a new tire once and after that the tires just become used, so that was kind of what we focused on with this project.
“If you think, this tire is three seconds faster than Michelin, it must be better, right? It’s not like that. The test is way more detailed. We’re seeing where we’re gaining by being able to lean over further in the corner and thus carry more speed. That’s what makes the tire better. We’re not judging every tire on the stopwatch—it’s more real-world, how the rider’s going to ride on the tire and feel it. In the Dunlop, the rider he has more confidence as he can lean over further.”
So the claims are good with the new Dunlop RoadSmart III. How about in the real world? Well, testing the longevity of a tire in an afternoon is next to impossible, but testing outright grip isn’t. For us to correctly evaluate the longevity of the tire, we’d need more than the allocated 150 miles we had on KTM’s superb Super Duke GT to do so, but lucky for us, California’s was in the middle of a drought-breaking rain season which gave us plenty of chance to sample the wet, dry, even dirt grip of the new RoadSmarts.
At first ride, the performance is extremely positive. I’ve ridden plenty of miles on the Dunlop RoadSmart IIs (they came standard on my 2015 Super Duke), but the outright grip and feel transmitted by the new RSIIIs is a clear step ahead.
Chasing a few bikes up through Malibu’s canyons that had everything from beautiful dry pavement to slippery as hell dirt from recent mudslides, I never once had to worry about the Dunlop’s performance.
On a big bike like the GT, the side of the tire feel was excellent. At the press briefing I got hold of a rear RSIII and was surprised at how soft the sidewall for what is classified as a Sport Touring tire, more so when I considered how stable it was under braking and acceleration. The road conditions meant speeds were a little down on what they could have been, but I left the test very impressed with the general performance, wet and dry, of the RSIII, but we’ll have to wait to conduct our own long distance testing.