Pirelli Scorpion Trail II Release First Impressions

Yep! This is a tire press release. I know, it's exciting stuff. Everyone loves to read a good tire release sitting in their easy chair wearing a smoking jacket, a pipe, and a nice single malt scotch. Yours truly is currently writing this while suffering from allergies and sipping a nice whiskey and ginger. Let's settle in and see what makes this tire worth reading about.

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Scorpion Trail II

The new Scorpion Trail II is the synthesis of joining two worlds: the sphere of off road competition and the road trip. Designed for the most demanding motorcyclists, it features key points of excellence, high mileage, consistency of performance for its entire tire life, and top notch wet behavior.

Scorpion Trail II is the new Pirelli tire specifically designed to meet the most demanding expectations of this market. I has an aggressive tread pattern that is supported by strong technological innovations—giving it good stability at high speeds, dirt traction, handling, comfort, and grip in all riding conditions (source: Pirelli).

That's all fine and fancy, but it really tells you nothing about the tire. Press releases are a simplistic tool to impart very technical knowledge to the masses. We are not the masses, we are the educated and unwashed riders of RideApart and we demand more. So more we shall have.

Techie Stuff

The Scorpion Trail II was designed with three main goals: high mileage, sporty handling, and wet weather handling. Normally if you draw a triangle and put one item at the corners, the more you move towards a point the more you give up of the other two. (It's called a project management triangle, but it works here as well.)

In the case of Pirelli, when they designed the new tire, they changed the parameters. Normally, in the middle, you have a circle and it would be quality. The further towards each tip, the more quality suffers. Instead of using the normal approach to mixing the silica and polymers and tweaking the compound to get things where you want them, they changed the process. The ingredients are the same but how they are prepared is different. It allows for a tire that grows in three directions on our triangle above instead of two.

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How?

*Queue more tech discussions*-- They took what they knew from the Scorpion Trail and the Angel GT and combined them. The grooving changed to a balance between the two DNA donor tires. They added breaks in the long longitudinal grooves to improve water run off. It seems counter intuitive to create a smaller groove until you think of the tire in operation. Those grooves are being compressed and by doing that, it removes more water.