Our favourite mad scientists at Garage 54 ENG recently asked the perfectly reasonable question: what do you do when winter ends and you don’t have summer tires? The reasonable answer, at least in Garage 54’s native Russia, is probably to wait; it’ll be winter again soon enough. Or you could buy a new set of summer shoes for your car. But if those two courses of action strike you as far too reasonable, there’s a third, surprisingly viable, option: flip your winter tires inside out.
The problem is that tires aren’t meant to flip inside out. There’s a lot of engineering that goes into making sure tires don’t do exactly that. So it takes the Garage 54 guys a lot of time, muscle and mechanical brute force to get two tires flipped with their insides on the outside. The results look closer to racing slicks than summer tires, but they still have a basic tire shape. Luckily, the tires mounted to the rims a little easier, and slipped on to the channel’s test Lada just as smoothly.
These guys aren’t exactly known for pulling off their experiments, especially when it comes to tires. Like the time they put oil barrels on a UAZ 469 or drove on wheels made of chains. But this experiment works…sort of? The Lada makes it to the road and keeps up with traffic and even manages a few aborted burn-outs but, as the host points out, it would be incredibly easy to blow one of these tires since the metal of the tire is so close to the surface.
This article was originally published in May 2020.