There’s a new tire in town that’ll make your rock crawls better. With advanced tread, better rubber, and excellent construction, Cliffhanger tires need to become your new go-to rock-crawling grippers.
We want to make sure you really understand why they’re so good, so we’re gonna take a closer look at every detail that makes these the best rock tires we’ve ever made.
First, we need to talk a little bit about why rocks are so dang tricky, and why they demand bespoke tires that are a little bit smarter and sturdier than any other terrain.
It all comes down to the anatomy of a boulder field. If you love rock crawling, you know all this already, but if you’re just figuring it out, this is what you need to know. Rocks typically have these three qualities all at once and all the time:
Road tires are great for smooth surfaces, but can’t handle the rest.
All-terrain tires can handle sharp obstacles and off-camber terrain well enough, but they don’t have the grip for smooth surfaces.
And forget about mud tires. They’re tough, but they’re all in for mud, and their tread patterns aren’t ideal for rocks.
So what does a rock tire do differently? Let’s take a closer look at Cliffhanger tires and find out!
You can’t just pick a cool-looking tire tread and expect it to perform. You have to design it, intentionally—the aggressive, head-turning style is born out of necessity.
That’s exactly the case with our Cliffhanger tread.
The first thing you’ll notice is the way the tread wraps around the tire onto the sidewall. This sidewall tread is perfect for when you’re wedged against a rock and need a little (or a lot) of side grip.
The next thing you’ll probably notice is all the siping cut into the surface of the lugs. Siping is like having micro-lugs on the surface of your normal lugs. It can grip and grab onto the kinds of micro-terrain you can find on the rock surfaces. Siping is like grabbing a pebble with your fingertips instead of trying to grab it with a pair of shovels.
Finally, the thing you won’t notice just by looking is the purpose of the center lug pattern. The lugs along the centerline are the biggest and flattest lugs on the whole tire. That’s to maximize the contact patch against flat rocks.
And one more thing: there are ejector ribs between the lugs. These ribs shake the rocks out from between the rocks to maintain maximum grip.
Cliffhanger tires have more than just awesome, perfectly thought-out tread—the rubber they’re made with was carefully selected too. And that’s true of both the standard and sticky compounds.
First, let’s talk about our sticky compound. We developed a proprietary compound specifically for serious rock crawlers. The hardness of rubber is measured on the durometer scale. The durometer rating indicates how hard the rubber is. The softer the rubber, the better it grips. The harder the rubber, the more durable it is.
Through testing and riding, we found that a durometer of 52 gave us the perfect combination of grip on rocks and durability. It’s on the soft side, so you definitely don’t want to spend a lot of time ripping around on pavement or in the wide-open desert.
Our sticky compound is a hardcore rock tire for hardcore rock crawlers through and through. It’s designed to get you through—and over—the toughest rock trails on the planet.
Our standard compound has a 65 durometer rating. While that’s a lot harder than the sticky compound, it’s soft enough to be effective on rocks.
What that harder durometer rating gives it is a lot more durability.
If you plan to use this as more of an all-terrain tire with a smattering of rock-crawling here and there, you’ll be better served with our standard compound.
When we say this compound is a lot more durable, we mean it. This is the same rubber compound we use in our Incursion tires. Those tires went on a 10-day, 2,000-mile race from Canada to Mexico. That’s hundreds of miles a day across some of the most varied and brutal terrain on the planet.
Durability isn’t just about the rubber compound, and Cliffhanger tires are full of smart designs that make them tougher than other tires, regardless of what compound you use.
At the core of this stronger design is the radial construction. Not only does radial construction give you a more flexible tire for better traction in rocks, but it also beefs up the backbone of the tread to help reduce wear and punctures.
Speaking of tread, Cliffhanger tires also have connecting ribs between many of the lugs to thicken up the thinnest sections of the tire surface. This helps prevent punctures from pointy rocks or sticks that try to sneak in between the lugs.
So what are you waiting for? From bottom to top, through-and-through, Cliffhanger tires give you more capability in rocks.
And the standard compound is tough enough for all kinds of all-terrain riding.
For an awesome tire that grips hard and won’t slow you down, you need Cliffhanger tires from SuperATV.
