Tires

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To represent their shop Kelly-Moss Road and Race, in 2019, Andy Kilcoyne and Victoria Thomas brought a custom build to the Radwood Car Show. It was an off-road Porsche 911 Safari complete with a rooftop tent and BFGoodrich® All-Terrain T/A® KO2® tires. Custom Porsches are a signature offering at Kelly-Moss, and their reputation for excellence precedes them.

Picture it: a zoologist drives over a brutally rocky ridge in South Africa, a three-time world ski champion cuts through a whiteout in the Colorado Rockies, and a young adventurer overlands through thick mud in the Scottish Highlands.

Sometimes big ideas happen quickly. Like the apple that struck Newton with a serendipitous thud, birthing the concept of gravity. But let’s be honest: that story is more of a fairytale, really.

As an on and off-road tire manufacturer, we work diligently to help our customers avoid the task of having to change a flat tire on the side of the road (or the trail).

Shimmering greens and blues of the aurora borealis dance overhead, casting an ethereal glow on Paul’s Ford Super Duty F-350 XL truck, which is purpose-built for every kind of search and rescue operation you can imagine.

Can a street-legal performance tire win against pure racing slicks? For a long time, the answer was no. Until 1970.

Under the dry desert skies of Northwest Mexico, amidst the roar of engines and the cheers of spectators, a small, almost inconspicuous UTV rolled across the finish line of the SCORE San Felipe 250. This small vehicle stood out among the trophy trucks that had crossed earlier. Its oversized tires, gleaming with the unmistakable BFGoodrich brand, caught the eye of Matt Hanlon, a Motorsports Engineer with BFGoodrich. That seemingly insignificant moment ignited a journey that would soon transform the UTV industry forever.

Looking back on a recent off-road expedition in the Colorado Rockies, there’s one thing that Roger Lovell, a BFGoodrich® Garage Pit Crew member, realized: You can’t climb mountains without the right gear. In this case, his set of BFGoodrich All-Terrain T/A® KO2 tires.

In 1920, John F. Sipe worked on a slaughterhouse floor in New York City’s meatpacking district. He spent his days shoveling guts into machinery wearing work boots with thick rubber soles. These boots slipped a lot on the slick factory floor, and after falling one too many times, John started to experiment with modifying them. 

He found that carving perpendicular notches into the tread of his work boots improved his traction drastically — plummeting his rate of workplace falls. 

And thus, the “sipe” was born. 

At least, as legend would have it.