quote:Originally posted by Tom@Seal Beach:
As tires age that nice flexible rubber in the side walls that holds them together gets hard and cracks, the fibers in the side walls flex and take a lot of load from bumps and lateral G's...all you need is a side wall to fail at speed and you'll not soon forget it. My guess is the tread area doesn't usually fail, its the side wall. Maybe if you're driving at 40 down a straight road, with nice smooth shoulders for run off and no traffic you could get away with it. But that's not very typical in a Pantera.
It might seem true, but my experience was quite the opposite. I was driving at about 25mph on a straight road with 12 year old Pirelli P7Rs that had less than 50 miles on them.
They split right between the tread with a rather dramatic "BANG!" Sidewalls were still fine, but the split right down the middle.
That did it for me - it could have been a lot more serious. I won't use old tires.