What is the ideal off-road tire? It's a tire that is great in mud, floats in sand, grabs on ice and snow, and sticks like glue to rocks. It will have a very strong and puncture resistant sidewall, and a long lasting tread design. And since we're dreaming, it should also drive straight and true on the street. An impossible dream? Not if you talk to the folks at Goodyear.

Goodyear's new Wrangler MTR with Kevlar Radial tire is a very strong candidate for filling that rather tall order. We tested a set of 40x13.5x17LT's and yes, they are very large tires that measure very, very closely to the advertised dimensions. Released earlier this year after two years of development, the MTR with Kevlar is an all new tire designed from the ground up. It features a very unique asymmetrical tread pattern and, with sidewall strength in mind, the addition of a Kevlar ply in the sidewall.

Improving sidewall strength really shows that Goodyear was listening to what off-roaders want, because nothing wilts your love for a tire faster than a fatal sidewall laceration. Goodyear claims a 35% increase in sidewall strength thanks to the Kevlar plies. We ran these tires at very low air pressure through root and rock infested trails, as well as a logging clear cut covered in tree debris and suffered not a single cut in the tire. After a few months of running these tires over a variety of terrain, we have no reason to disbelieve Goodyear's sidewall strength claims.

Moving on to the tread design, these tires are visually striking because they don't look like anything we have seen before. We were continually peppered with questions and queries about the MTR Kevlars whenever other wheelers saw them on our test rig and the truth is, when you first see these tires the only reaction is to scratch your head trying to figure out what they are all about. Most wheelers thought the tires looked funny. My reaction was that I thought they looked pretty cool. This is an asymmetric tread pattern so when mounting them there is a distinctive inside and outside of the tread pattern, but there is no directional tread pattern so you can mount them on either side of your rig without issue. We feel that this is preferable to directional treads because you can rotate your spare properly and there is no loss in forwards or backwards performance.

• Snow: We received our test set of tires in early spring, but were able to do quite a few trail rides in very wet and heavy spring corn snow. In these conditions with a lot of airing down, the tires performed beyond what we expected. Low pressures produced a very large sidewall bulge and thus a very big footprint for a lot of floatation. In our area, bias ply IROKs have been the snow performance kings and we were able to keep up with two rigs sporting 42" versions of that tire. Once again this was only in wet spring corn snow and we all were running about 4-5 lbs of air pressure.
• Mud: We basically dislike mud a lot but managed to find ourselves on one of the worst mud trails in our area. Light to moderate mud is not a problem for these tires. The inside tread pattern is tight and will clog up with mud but the wide spacing in the outside lugs will clean out easily with a bit of tire spin. In the worst and deepest mud these tires will clog up but anything short of dedicated bias ply mud tires would do the same. If you're buying this tire for overall off-road performance (ie: not specifically for mud and snotty terrain), you won't be disappointed by their mud performance.
• Dirt road: We were extremely pleased with how well these tires grab on loose dirt. Most trails around here require a fair bit of a drive on a logging roads in order to get to the fun stuff. Sometimes we end up going a bit faster than we should and these tires provided a lot of positive grip when hauling butt around corners in loose and hard dirt.
• Rock: Tires deliver a lot of sticky on rocks both wet and dry. Because the tires are not directional, there was no difference in traction when going forward or backward. They grabbed in a very consistent manner.
• Street: We found the MTR Kevlar to be a top notch street tire. These tires track straight and handle great which is a lot to ask of a 40" tire. Rain performance was fine, no hydroplaning, no problems with braking. We were just really pleased to be able to drive down the road without wander on a 40" tire. This was something we were not used to.

Overall our feeling is that Goodyear has hit a home run with the MTR Kevlar, we will go out on a limb and say that this is the best all around tire that we have used. It did everything well and didn't have any glaring weaknesses. As we said, the mud performance was good but not on par with dedicated mud tires. But considering the target market for this tire, the mud performance was very good. It's quite surprising to us that tire technology has come so far that a 40" tire can work great off road and yet still be a nice easy to drive street tire.

Adhesion to bare rock was very good.	Although they don't look as aggressive as some tires, they worked very well on hardcore obstacles.	The tight tread pattern portion of the tire worked well at holding the snow, like a good snow tire would.
Mud performance was very acceptable, especially for a multi-purpose tire.		The sidewalls held up well to the abuse we threw at them.
Testing the tires in a logging clear cut.	The tires measured very close to their advertised dimensions.