Goodyear switches Optitrac farm tyre product strategy to specific applications

Goodyear has detailed a change to the product strategy of its million-selling Optitrac range of farm radial tyres, which is to become more application focused. Commenting on these new developments to the Optitrac range, Phil Stanton, Goodyear’s Farm Tyre manager, said: “Goodyear has found that the trends in the agricultural machinery market, particularly with the high end machines, means that application specific tyres will be required in the future. The differing performance requirements of tractors and harvesters can no longer be fully satisfied by the same tyre. The 2 new ranges of tyres will clearly segment our OPTITRAC product line into specific tyres for tractors and for harvester machines and will have features that will provide the performance benefits demanded by the operators of these machines.”

The current line up of tyres in the Optitrac range comprises the: DT800 narrow tyres for row crop work, DT806 85 series tyres, DT812 70 series tyres, DT818 HIGH SPEED 65 series tyres, DT824 high volume tyres, DT830 Super volume tyres and finally the R+ high speed and high load tyres for tractors. Goodyear says its detailed analysis of trends in the market has led to the decision to adapt the family names of the largest tyres in the Optitrac range to match them more closely to the performance demands of the largest machines operating in agricultural applications.

The change will see the phasing out of the DT824 and DT830 families which will be replaced by 2 application specific tyre ranges: an expanded R+ range designed for high spec tractors above 160HP and a new H+ product designed for machines carrying out harvesting operations which demand very specific performance criteria.

Tractors running on the R+ tyres are increasingly operating at high speeds up to 70kmh and have higher axle loads; they are also carrying out many different applications including increased road time. H+-shod machines run over the road with constant axle loads, they then work in the field with very different axle loads and may include cyclic loads when the machine has a hopper or tank that is being filled and emptied in recurring cycles.

The H+ range will also include tyres which are designed to operate at higher deflection levels, which will be marked with the letters IF as a prefix to the size and CFO as a suffix. These tyres have been designed in line with a four-year 2009 ETRTO experimental standard which allows a load bonus of up to 55 per cent for cyclic field operations without the need to increase the inflation pressure. This new range was first shown in February 2011 at the SIMA show held in Paris with the introduction of the first 2 sizes: IF800/70R32 CFO and IF800/75R32 CFO.

Further sizes and load variations will be added to these new ranges during 2011, and will be exhibited alongside the other tyres in the segment at Cereals 2011 in June.

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