2018 Chaparral Motorsports 25" ATV Tire Shootout Part 3: The Best Tires For Specific Tasks

Welcome to part three of our 25" ATV Tire Shootout for 2018. Today we will be digging in, taking a look at which of the tires we tested are best suited for specific tasks or job duties.

To catch you up, in the previous two articles, we discussed the tests we put these tires through in Part 1 and then for Part 2 we discussed the Top 8 Best Overall Performing Tires. If you are tuning in for the first time, in a nutshell, we took 21 of our best selling or most popular ATV tires, mounted them to aluminum wheels, took them out in into the field and put them through five different tests on a 2017 Yamaha Kodiak 700. We tested their Pulling Power, how well they handle extreme Hill Climbs, how well they Brake Downhill, how fast they come to a Stop at Full Speed and how well they handle Deep Sticky Mud.

Let's dig in and explain how we scored this event to determine which tires came out on top for each specific challenge or skill set that we tested. In each test we gave the best performing tire a score of 1 and the worst performing tire a score of 21. The top tire in this Shootout brought home a total score of 25 and the worst performing tire earned a score of 85. Check out the second article in this series for a rundown of the top 8 performing tires in our ATV tire shootout.

Now let's get down and dirty talking about which tires were the best performing tires for each of the specific tests, tasks or job duties. Spoiler alert, in each test there were clear winners and those winners did not necessarily make the best overall tire line-up we covered in Part 2 of this Shootout

Sled Pull: Which Tires are The Best Tires for Pulling or Hauling

Do you primarily use your ATV for hauling heavy loads? Do you use it for pulling heavy objects or machinery? If so, the results of our Sled Pull Challenge will be of interest to you. We built a weighted sled, which had an overall weight of just over 3,500 pounds and a front skid weight of 380 pounds. We hit the throttle on the ATV and flipped the switch on the sled and as the vehicle moved forward, the weight increased at the skid. Only nine tires made a full run and here are the specs of the top five best pulling or hauling tires.

Is it not interesting that of these five "best pulling or hauling" tires, only two of them made the "Top 8 Performers and the other three did not do so great in the overall results? Moving right along...

Hill Climb: Which Tires Get to the Summit the Quickest

If your passion is climbing the biggest, gnarliest hills you can find, then pay close attention. Of the 21 popular tiers we put to the test only 17 of them made it to the top of our Hill Climb Challenge. Only ten of them made it to the summit in less than 15 seconds! Three of them were Quadboss tires! If you frequently charge steep hills, take a look:

Downhill Braking: How Fast Can the Tires Come to a Full Stop

Opposite of our last test, if you depend on your tires to A: stop you quickly while traveling downhill, or B: to hold you stopped on a super steep decline we have the perfect tires for you. Let's look at the five tires that will bring your rig to a stop in less than 2.5 seconds.

We found these tires stopping power to be very impressive! The majority of the other tires took nearly 2/3rds longer to stop than these winners. Now let's look at Top Speed Braking.

Top Speed Braking: 1/8 of Mile Run Full Wide Open + Panic Stop

If running your ATV wide open and your number one criteria for safety is stopping your vehicle as quickly as possible, the results of this test might peak your interest. The results here were staggering with a variance of 6 seconds of slide time. Just crazy. In distance, the 2.1-second mark was about 10 feet and the 8-second mark was about 55 feet of white knuckle sliding. Let's look at the four tires that stopped in 2.5 seconds or less:

If you ride your vehicle in an area where "someone or something" darts into your path on a regular basis, the tires above are your best choices if you are looking to avoid a collision. Six seconds of "extra sliding" could be the difference between a safe stop or a complete disaster. Now let's get dirty.

Mud Traction Test: Which Tires Can Make it Through The Quickest

This was a fun one, finding a mud pit in Southern California can be difficult-especially with an rather dry winter. Well, we ended up busting out the tractor and spent more than a week making the "perfect mud pit" that ended up being just under 100 feet in length complete with about 2 feet of sloppy mud. In four wheel drive on the Kodiak 700 all of the tires made it. So, we put the Kodiak into two wheel drive and hit the pit. There were four tires that really excelled here earning timed runs of less than 13 seconds! This was quick considering there was one tire that did not finish the run and seven of the tires took nearly 20 seconds to finish the run, churning and turning... but never loosing forward momentum. Let's look at those four top performers.

The next best performing, the ITP Blackwater Evolution, took almost 2 seconds longer (1.6 to be exact) for a run time of 14.4 seconds! Nowhere close to the champs, but way better than the Kenda BearClaw K299 which could not finish at all... or the runner up for "worst mud tire," the Sedona Coyote with a 19.3 second run.

Well that wraps up our report of which tires performed best in in the specific tests of our 25" ATV Tire Shootout of 2018. In part two you learned the Top 8 Best Overall Performing Tires and here today you learned the best tires for a specific task. Please stay tuned as we will be releasing the test results for each of the 21 tires with raw test footage to back-up our claims. Thank you for following our 2018 25" ATV Tire Shootout.

You can check out the video recap we posted to our YouTube channel