Michelin Pilot Sport Endurance

[freebeard]

tire-reviews.com: Michelin Launches The Pilot Sport Endurance 2026: Racing Towards a Sustainable Future

Michelin has unveiled its next-generation racing tires for the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, featuring 50% renewable and recycled materials while promising enhanced performance characteristics.

The new MICHELIN Pilot Sport Endurance 2026 range forms part of Michelin's broader "All-Sustainable" strategy, which targets 100% renewable and recycled materials across all tire production by 2050, with an intermediate goal of 40% by 2030. Currently, sustainable materials account for 31% of Michelin's total material purchases.
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While the immediate focus remains on racing applications producing approximately 10,000 tires annually for IMSA's top classes, the technologies and methodologies developed will transfer to Michelin's production tire range. This includes simulation tools, sustainable material sourcing, and manufacturing processes that can scale across the company's annual production of nearly 200 million tires.

That Voronoi tread pattern is apparently so shallow it wears off in two laps.

[Ecky]

I had a set of Pilot Sport 4 on my Miata. Despite being 10mm wider, and being Ultra High Performance summer tires as opposed to Summer Touring tires, they seemingly had lower rolling resistance than the Continental UltraContacts that replaced them, as well as more grip, wet and dry. I was very impressed with those Pilot Sports.

Reminds me of the Yokohama line a few years back that used orange oil and was supposedly better. Except those Yokohamas aren't actually great tires to drive on.

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I'm aware tires shed a tremendous amount of microplastics and chemicals into the environment. Most of those chemicals, at least a few years ago, were un-studied. It appears tire manufacturers are generally following the plastic manufacturers, where once a chemical component is found to be toxic or whatever and banned, they move to an adjacent component which hasn't yet been identified as toxic, but probably has similar properties.