When you’ve been in the racing business as long as someone like Jack Roush has, other people and companies come to garner a certain respect for you. This respect, along with networking, opens a lot of doors that might be closed to other people. It’s hard to imagine just any old Joe Schmoe having a custom tire designed for their car…but that is exactly what Cooper Tires did for Roush and his line of RS3 Mustangs.
This brief video gives us an inside look at what went into designed the Cooper Zeon RS3-A and RS3-S tires for Roush’s brand of supercharged Mustangs.
Roush approached Cooper about building these tires with some pretty tough performance requirements. Cooper designed these tires to pretty much be the “ultimate” performance tire package for the RS3 Mustang, which packs 540 horsepower from its supercharged 5.0 liter V8 engine. That is a lot of power, enough to easily shred a lesser tire.
The collaboration with Roush produced two different tires; the RS3-A ,which is designed for dry duty as an extreme track tire, and the RS3-S tire. The RS3-S has a slightly different pattern and chemical compound to help its performance under wet conditions. Neither tire would exist though without input from Roush, that’s for sure.