Michelin has flown us to Thailand for the launch of two of their new offerings that is the Michelin Pilot Street tyres for below 150cc bikes and Michelin Pilot Street Radial tyres for 150cc to 300cc bikes. There are media that are invited from the respective launch target country that is Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines and Malaysia. It was an interesting launch event to meet bike media and enthusiasts from other neighbouring country. All of them has passion and lots of knowledge about bikes.
I’ll be dividing this article into three posts:
Part I about Michelin Pilot Street
Part II about Michelin Pilot Street Radial
Part III about the test ride.
Part I: Michelin Pilot Street
Pilot Street are targeted 100% street use positioning. This means that it is made to be able to handle the daily commute road stress and wear.
Michelin have studied about their target consumers and their expectations for the tyres. Previous model of the Michelin tyre that is the Michelin Pilot Sporty (MPS) has been a great tyre but lack of grip in wet condition. Michelin Pilot Street are set to make this tyre having great grip whether on dry or wet road.
Michelin Pilot Street are targeted for high-end urban bikes under 250cc starting from the lowest one as seen as the Yamaha Mio and Honda Click-i with have 14-inch wheel. This is a good move since there are many modders in Asean countries that are looking high performance tyre for better power transfer from the engine to the transmission and finally to the tyre to the road.
One of the improved part of the tyre is the variable groove width on the tread pattern that facilitates the evacuation of water when the tyre on wet condition. This sometimes referred as aqua-channel. We can see from the picture that the width increases from 3mm on the center groove to 5mm on the shoulder groove and 6mm at the very end of the aqua-channel. This provides better wet condition grip and test results shows that the wet braking performance almost matched the dry braking performance. Some of us are very used to the Michelin Pilot Sporty which provides great grip on dry but suffers on wet condition, but this Pilot Street has managed to overcome the problem and now the wet grip and braking are now much better than its predecessor.
The durability of the Michelin Pilot Street are also increased to 30% more of tyre life. We have interviewed Mr Laurent about this and he said that the durability differs between bikers and riding style, but whatever style or riding condition you have, you will have 30% more tyre life. For example, if your riding style gives you 10,000km of tyre life, you should get 13,000km on the Michelin Pilot Street.
The tread pattern design is unmistakenly Michelin that usually features simple lines but a very interesting ones. It is derived from Michelin Sport Touring Radial and should give a great look to the bike. A little detail that you must see is that the front tread pattern and rear tread pattern have opposing direction of the aqua-channel. This is due to front tread pattern are optimised for handling, and the rear are optimised for braking.
I haven’t got the information about the price yet, but I estimates at RM200. I’ll update as soon as I get the info from the dealer.
This is the official shot of the tyre and more on the gallery below. Already available in the on May 1st 2013 on the shop near you.
There is one more model that is the Michelin Pilot Street Radial, but I’ll save that for tomorrow post for part II. Keep in touch!
