Tires
Actually not exactly period correct. The original T/A tire was an all Rayon construction tire and came in HR60-15 size only for Greenwoods Corvette sponsored by BFG in 72.
Different tire all together. Actual street tires trickled out starting in the mid 70's and were never an OEM tire, unlike the Goodyear Poly-glas, and Firestone Wide-oval which were original equipment on many performance cars.
The tread design changed as did the lettering size starting in the late 70's with the change to Alpha Numeric sizing and then Metric sizing.
BFG as well as Uniroyal were absorbed by Michelin in the late 80's and the tires change again, but this time on the inside. The current T/A is built on a Uniroyal steel belted carcass using a BFG T/A tire mold. The original T/A's were NOT steel belted radials and that was the trick to there high performance success. Early steel belted radials were prone to broken belts, belt seperations. The T/A was built in on Factory by a special team of tire builders to control quality. They used a 2 ply Rayon carcass and 2 xtra-wide rayon belts folded to make 2 layers for each ply. The tire ended up with 6 plies under the tread and no belt edge at the tires edges. Very good tire. No common radial separation problems. That tires was made before 1988.
How do I know this ? I started in the tire business P/T in 1968 working for Uni-Royal and then full time in 1973 for the west coast BFG tire distributor.
Anybody selling BFG tires in the Western US, bought them from us.
We each had to be T/A certified by BFG to sell the T/A line of tires.
