Porsche And Michelin Built A Brand New Tire For A 20-Year-Old Supercar

Image: Porsche

It isn’t exactly common for automobile manufacturers to focus on continued development of its decades-old long-dead product lines, but Porsche is serious about keeping its Carrera GT owners happy. Porsche factory racing driver Joerg Bergmeister worked directly with Michelin to develop a new sticky tire specifically formulated to make the car even better now than it was at the time it launched in 2003. The new Carrera GT–spec Pilot Sport Cup 2 is a huge improvement from the Pilot Sport 2 the car had from the factory, which are notoriously bad in cold and wet weather. It’s better even than the Pilot Super Sports that Porsche developed for the car in 2013, as well.

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A few weeks ago we detailed that owners would get a fresh set of tires for their Carrera GT when the car was brought in to fix the long-lived suspension recall. This new tire is an important way for Porsche to keep CGT owners happy, because these cars are now worth deep into the seven figures and Porsche wants them to continue buying high-dollar P-cars. Only 1,270 units of the Carrera GT were built new, and at least a few of those have been destroyed in the intervening 20-ish years, so this is a huge engineering investment from Porsche for a really small subset of car culture. Admittedly that subset includes folks like Jerry Seinfeld, Jay Leno, and Ralph Lauren.

Image: Porsche

“The Carrera GT is an absolute dream car. This is why I’m particularly excited that the new tire raises the performance of this legend to a new level,” said Bergmeister. “It’s very unusual for new tires to be developed for a 20 year old vehicle. This underscores how important the Carrera GT is for Porsche and their customers to this day.”

“The new tires do not just make the Carrera GT faster, they also make it easier for the driver to pilot the car in a spirited manner. This demonstrates that tire development never stands still. In particular, motorsport as a development platform enables technology to make its way into production tires. This technology transfer noticeably improves performance.”

How much better performance do these tires achieve than the ones the car was originally equipped with? Porsche doesn’t get into the specifics of lateral grip or lap times, though both are surely better. It does, however, elucidate some pretty impressive statistics for braking performance. The new tire will stop a CGT a full eight feet earlier in a stop from 62 mph, and an impressive 39 feet shorter from 124 mph. And you can bet it’s going to be exponentially shorter from the car’s 205-mph top speed.

Image: Porsche

Carrera GTs were notorious for tricky handling, as the carbon chassis supercar features a peaky Formula 1–developed 8,400-rpm V10 engine and practically no electronic driver assist features outside of anti-lock brakes. These new tires will help make the car slightly easier to control, as the new tire’s breakaway characteristics are much more progressive and communicative. That should also help prevent some well-heeled not-so-hot-shoes from spinning their car at high speed into a light post.