It's obvious by the magazine you're holding that you care about tires. Most people see tires as little more than a commodity, to be replaced as quickly and cheaply as possible when they wear out. Not you. You know your vehicle's control depends on four small tire contact patches, each not much bigger in surface area than your hand.
How these contact patches interact with the road surface in dry, wet, snowy and icy conditions determines whether your car does what it should, or goes spinning off into the scenery. Good tires can make your day. Buy the wrong ones and you pay for it in soggy handling, low grip and plummeting self-esteem.
For over 20 years, a company has trained scores of sales people in the finer points of performance driving and high-performance tire construction. It does so by obtaining millions of miles of real-world enthusiast experience with various tires and tire/wheel packages. Then it makes all this information available to anyone with access to a telephone or the web. That company is The Tire Rack.
The Tire Rack started in 1979 when car guy Mike Joines graduated from college with a degree in finance, heading for Wall Street. First, he needed boots for his Opel Manta. He couldn't find what he wanted locally and began to wonder if he could turn his love of cars into a business.
Joines approached his father-in-law, Pete Veldman, who was in automotive parts and service. Joines proposed they start selling European tires for European cars from a small gas station on a street corner in Indianapolis.
Veldman agreed to help fund the plan. They called the company The Tire Rack, because they were selling tires from racks placed in front of the garage. Joines mounted and balanced tires for customers, quickly developing a reputation for providing useful information about what worked best on which cars.
In the late '70s and early '80s, companies were selling European tires via mail order to enthusiasts who wanted the crisp handling this rubber could produce. The Tire Rack followed suit in 1982, placing small ads in magazines. The company soon outgrew its gas station home, using multi-page ads in enthusiast publications to act as its storefront.
Veldman had some extra warehouse space in South Bend, Indiana, so operations moved there as growth continued. The explosion of the performance tire market in the late '80s fueled this growth, as more and more cars came from the factory with specialized performance tires. In 1996, The Tire Rack went into cyberspace-online ordering now accounts for almost half the company's sales.
For an enthusiast, buying exactly the right replacement tire is difficult. It's generally considered that a car's original tires are a compromise of factors: wet and dry traction, all-season performance, tread noise, rolling resistance, and wear. Choices made by a manufacturer to emphasize one characteristic while sacrificing others may not be the same choice you wish to make.
So how do you decide which tire fits your needs? It's nearly impossible to sample a variety of different brands and types, so word of mouth, magazine tests and information from the Internet must be evaluated. Traditional tire retail stores tend to sell whatever is most profitable to them, or whatever they have in stock, and can't always be counted on to know what's best for a specific, performance-oriented customer.
Complicating things further, a manufacturer may make half a dozen or more versions of a specific size in a specific line to meet the requirements of, say, Volkswagen, Audi, Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Volvo. Each will be slightly different, tuned for each manufacturer, and putting a BMW-tweaked tire on a Volvo might result in a ride and handling balance different to that which Volvo's chassis engineers intended.