Shant Ohannessian

Yupp with barely 1000 miles on these new Michelin Pilot Sport tires. Urrrrr i hope i didnt bend or damage the 18" hollow spokes. On the inner side of the tire, it ripped all around. How is this possible???? I can still smell the burn of tire when i enter the garage. Can i fight this? Here are some pics of it.







Note the rubber pieces of the tire all over the muffler and anywhere visible.

stedge

I am very relieved you are OK.

Who mounted the tires?

JPS

Seems that either Michelin or the tire shop is liable for that one, but I'm no lawyer.

Randy M

Be happy that is all that happened. I had an '83 SC about 8 years ago. I had a set of P7's put on and they forgot to torque down the driver side front wheel. Well the wheel flew off on my car on I-5 doing about 70mph. Luckily nothing happened to me, my wife, or the car other than the fender getting a little buggered, the wheels studs looking like Medusas head and the ball joint got grounded down a little. If I was going around a corner it could have been very ugly. There were alot of trucks on the road that day.

Shant Ohannessian

Thanks for the kind words. The place i bought the tires also mounted and balanced them. It's called Wheel Enhancement in Culver City.

Glen

What has occured there is that the tire was run low and that cooks the edge where You see the failure on both sides. These tires spread the load across a broad area and You can actually drive them a pretty good way before they ultimately will dismount like yours did. I have had the same thing occur and it was a nail that led to a low pressure and me ruining the sidewall. The second time we actually hit an object in the road, the lr tire blew and I drove all the way to the hospital on it that way as my wife was in labor. Still remember seing the thrashed inner and outer sidewall as a result at the tirestore later after changing to the temp spare in the hospital parking lot. Either You hit something or the shop did not inflate it to proper pressure or You had a slow leak You missed.

Dave Crellin

Wheel enhacement make a big thing about serving Porsches, pretty much exclusively.

They should stand behind the workmanship.

ca993twin

Shant,

Wow. That is really awful. Wheel Enhancements seems like a relly good place, and should make this right or have an awfully plausable explanation why its not them or the tire manufacuter's fault (in either case, W.E. should take care of everything). I seriously doubt that your wheel is still in factory spec... it takes very little to "tweak" a rear hollow spoke out of the very tight factory tolerances. W.E. can measure the runout and help determine if they owe you a wheel as well as a tire (as well as a clean-up).

Lots of people on this board do business with W.E. or are planning to in the near future because of their excellent reputation. Let us all know how this turns out, so we will know if their reputation is deserved!

911

Shant,

Glad to hear nothing else happened because that could have been a bad deal. I just had some tires mounted yesterday from Wheel Enhancement, so I hope everything is okay on my car. Anyway, please keep us informed to what happened.

Rich

chris walrod

Thats definitely scary. Luckily you weren't in the middle of a turn or a highly loaded situation!

Let us know what W.E. says.

Hope your rim is fine as well!

fbfisher

I ruined a perfectly good SO2 rear by running with low pressure. The inside side wall was worn out and starting to separate. Could not see the damage until the tire was removed for a routine balance check. $500 for two new rears mounted and lesson learned - check pressure regularly.

Cy

Hey Shant,

I would agree that you had a low pressure situation in the tire that caused excessive flexing of the side wall, leading to extremely high temps in the the flexed portion of side wall. This heat and stress ultimately degraded the structure of the tire and caused the failure. There are two key factors in this type of failure 1.) how low the pressure is and 2.) the speed of travel.

I think this argument is further supported by the fact that you can smell burnt rubber. If you just had a catestrophic failure bought on by another, non-heat related factor the rubber wouldn't have cooked. The temps get *so* high during these types of failures that it will burn the rubber and that does not smell good.

If you take a look at the tread, you might be able to see an object or some other sign of damage to the tire (it's easier if you look or run your hand on the inside of the tire). Although, it's possible the damaged piece disintegrated as part of the failure. You should also see some stress damage to the side wall that is still connected to the tread.

You mention you have hollow spokes . . . I wonder if there could be a rim issue. Based on the quality control in tire production these days, I would be *very* surprised if there was a manufacturing flaw in a tire that led to this.

When you do get a new tire, *make sure* you've found the cause of this issue. If it is a rim issue, valve stem issue, etc. this could easily happen again. Check your tire pressures frequently until your sure everything is fine. Of note, low profile tires don't tend to get the same obvious low pressure bulge in the side wall that high profile tires get. Further, it takes a tire operating way below pressure spec before you'll see it bulge.

Glad your OK.

(Note, this is an example of a simple incident that cause SUVs to roll over . . . i.e. the SUV blows a tire and the person slams on the brakes. Well, on the front or rear axle they now only have braking traction on one end of the axle which causes the SUV to want to rotate sideways. Going sideways in an SUV at high speed unfortunately increases your chances of rolling it over.)

Shant Ohannessian

Well i talked to W.E. They arent going to replace it Even though it has barely 1000 miles! Anyways i told my brother to take it back to W.E. and buy a new tire. Its going to cost 300$ mounted. Im pretty sure the pressure in the tire was good because i check it often. I still dont know the condition of the rim because i havent talked to my brotehr yet. W.E. was going to check to see if i messed up the rim or not. I will inform you if i need a new rim or not. I hope not.

Thanks for all the replys. Im surprised that W.E. didnt do anything about it but then again, we are talking about a tire that will wear out eventually.

Shant Ohannessian

Thank you Cy for the info. And everyone else. This might have been my fault but im pretty sure that i checked the tire pressure and it was normal. I might have went over an object that caused my tire pressure to go down thus causing my tire to heat up and rip apart.

JPS

I think you would have noticed...I notice 2-3 lbs of difference, at least in the front, while driving, let alone the difference that would have been there from a tire THAT low...I'd push harder with W.E...