Thawley Invents Scented Tires – Sort of

Kumho announced their new lavender scented “Arroma Tire” a few weeks ago.

The press release got posted on one of the roadrace forums I frequent where everyone subsequently began making fun of it. (That’s mostly what goes on there anyway, but the idea of lavender scented tires was more worthy of ridicule than most…)

It was more than I could bare to watch this topic go on without claiming some connection to the whole concept. Here’s what happened:

A couple of years ago, I was invited to BeaveRun Raceway in PA for a Kumho tire intro. It was a big dog & pony show for all the enthusiast magazine journos to check out Kumho's new ECSTA SPT. They had all kinds of demonstrations and entertainment for us. Auto-x, road course, 4x4 trips, rally VW rides, etc. They also had rides in the 240SX drift cars that Kumho was sponsoring. This was right after they had come out with the drift tire that made colored smoke...

I do my best to avoid the marketing wags at these events and prefer instead to spend my time with the engineers. They not only know the answers to my questions, but will often candidly offer them, too.

So I had gotten to be pals with the race tire engineer and pestered him mercilessly about tire compounds, heat cycles and shit. And we were really hitting it off. So I'm fresh out of the plane-crash, drifting demo and start bullshitting with my engineer pal again. He's excited. He wants to know how I like the drift car and mostly, what I think of his colored smoke. I make all of the appropriate noises and jokingly praise him for this miraculous feat of molecular engineering and all of its benefits to mankind. I am kind of being a smart-ass because I'm done with the whle drift thing and want to learn more about race tires. But he really wants more feedback. "So", he says, "is there anything else you think we could do for this market?"

"Yeah", I say, "can you make the smoke smell like something besides burnt rubber?" He took me serious as a heart attack and spent the rest of the afternoon looking sort of like the absent minded professor on the brink of a new discovery.

True story.

As forum regular and super genius, Scott Rinde put it, “So in this case then the answer to "Who is the fucking genius who thought this up?" is Thawley?”

I guess so. Sorry.