Michelin Announces New Pilot Sport A/S 3+ All Season Tire at NAIAS

Here’s some great news from our friends at Michelin for those Corvette owners who like to drive their cars all year round.

This week at the North American International Auto Show, Michelin introduced the latest edition to the Pilot family of performance tires – the Michelin Pilot Sport All-Season 3+.

Helping to introduce the new tires was Corvette Racing’s Tommy Milner, who was there to showcase Michelin’s commitment for transferring the best high-performance racing technology into a street tire made for North America roads.

Michelin’s new Pilot Sport A/S 3+ provides all-season performance with incredible wet and dry braking. Michelin says the new tire provides 28% better snow traction than the previous Pilot Sport A/S 3 and that gives the tire the shortest wet and dry braking of leading competitive tires in the category.

“All-season tires are known for being effective for three seasons, and in regions with light-to-moderate winter weather,” said Scott Clark, chief operating officer, Michelin North America. “For those considering high performance all-season tires, the Michelin Pilot Sport A/S3+ is the best choice as it combines breakthrough levels of dry and wet grip while providing great snow traction for true all-season performance.”

As a member of the Pilot Family, the MICHELIN Pilot Sport A/S3+ benefits from Michelin’s heritage in endurance racing and arsenal of technological innovations. Specifically, the new tire features:

• Michelin’s Helio+ Compound combined with unique biting edges in the tread grooves that grab loose snow to help acceleration and braking in winter conditions, resulting in confident mobility in cold and snow conditions.
  
  
• Variable Contact Patch 3.0, originally developed for Formula 1 endurance racing, which distributes the forces and temperatures more evenly over the contact patch. It is combined with an aggressive asymmetric tread pattern inspired by the MICHELIN Pilot Super Sport, simultaneously maximizing dry grip, wet grip and even wear.
  
  
• Extreme amounts of silica in the tread compound (derived from wet endurance race tire technology used at Le Mans) combined with variable thickness sipes and large circumferential grooves, resulting in incredible wet grip and resistance to hydroplaning in deep water.

The new tires will be available beginning in March and following the launch, they will be available in 90 sizes ranging from 175/65/R15 to 285/35/ZR20.

Unfortunately, that leaves out C6 Z06/ZR1 and C7 Z06 models which wear 335s in the rear. A response to our initial inquiry about the Z06 sizes was that the new A/S 3+ tire would be available for “all flavors” but after requesting a second confirmation, we were told the new tires would not be made in those sizes. A previous version of this article said that 335-sized Pilot Sport A/S 3+ all-season tires would be available later in the fall and we regret that error.

While the new tires will be available in March, you can visit the Michelin tire Selector to find the correct tire for your Corvette or other vehicle at www.michelinman.com.

Source:
Michelin

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