por 
THE BAJA POST
NEWSROOM
SOURCE: PR NEWSMEDIA
This year, Goodyear (NASDAQ: GT) celebrates 45 years of its most recognizable ultra-high-performance product line, Goodyear Eagle branded tires. Uniting the company’s exhilarating performance for sports cars with its heritage in the world’s premier racing championships, Goodyear Eagle tires are an icon both on and off the track.
The story of Eagle continues to this day, with its latest model – Eagle F1 Asymmetric 6 – being one of the best-sellers in Europe and Asia and recently introduced in the Americas. The story behind it incorporates fascinating innovation, evolving from the track to the street model after model, writing the history of motorsport and equipping some of the most desirable sports cars of the past half-century.
«Win on Sunday, sell on Monday»
The name ‘Eagle’ has become closely associated with motorsports, alongside the Goodyear brand, due to its frequent appearance on motorsports tires opposite the Goodyear logo. Goodyear had occasionally used the Eagle name before, but 1980 marked a significant milestone. That year, Goodyear increased investments to lead the high-performance tire market, applying its racing technologies and expertise to consumer products. To strengthen the connection between track and road, the company decided to use the same name for both its racing and ultra-high-performance tires: the Goodyear Eagle brand.
A Goodyear press kit of the era admitted «tires don’t have much inherent sex appeal». Offering drivers tires chosen by their heroes Andretti, Earnhardt, Senna, Prost, Foyt, Unser and Petty was certainly a way to combat that. With one name to communicate the shared DNA between the race and road tires, the new Goodyear Eagle high performance road tires proved as popular as they were successful on the track.
The first official Eagle road tire was launched for the US market in 1981 and was followed by the Eagle VR50, developed soon after to meet the stricter European speed requirements. VR stood for ‘V-rated’, denoting that the tire met what was at that time the highest speed rating restrictions in Europe to be capable of sustained speeds of up to 130 mph (209 km/h). To develop the Eagle VR50, which had a directional ‘gatorback’ tread pattern derived from the company’s F1 wet tire of the era, Goodyear teams in the US and Germany worked together to develop a tire ready for the unrestricted speeds of the German autobahn. Back in America, it was chosen as original equipment on both the Chevrolet Corvette and Pontiac Firebird Trans Am.
More and more high-performance tires used the Eagle name to link back to Goodyear’s winning heritage. The Eagle GT variant had a prominent placement on Doc Brown’s DMC DeLorean time machine in Back to the Future, while Eagle ST became the go-to choice for muscle cars and Eagle NCT for luxury cars. It was in 1993, though, when a new legend was born.
Naming a tire after a car is one thing, but when that name remains on the side of millions of tires even today, over three decades later, it must have been special.
Eagle F1: To new levels of performanceIn 1992, McLaren launched its McLaren F1, at the time the world’s fastest production car with a Guinness World Record speed of 240.1 mph (386.4 km/h). To meet the demands asked for this impressive feat of engineering, Goodyear developed a special tire for it: the Eagle F1. McLaren’s original press release1 highlighted the importance of Goodyear’s contribution: «Right from the McLaren F1’s initial design, the tire was considered as an intrinsic suspension element within the programme’s complex handling and comfort calculations. Weight, safety, noise and dynamic performance were all vital factors.»
