True. The introduction of radial tire technology in motorcycles came from the racing world. Bias ply tires have the nasty habit of stretching and elongating at very high speeds, due to rotational forces. As racing speeds climbed higher, racers noticed this tendency more often. The tire could come completely separated from the rim if the speed was high enough.Sev wrote:Radial tires from what I understand handle high speeds better then a bias tire or bias-ply.
I remember seeing a video of a racer in the '80s(can't remember which) running speed tests on a new bike at a track. He was doing somewhere in the neighborhood of 180 mph and you could actually see the tire stretching off the rim (just before he crashed).