Features

Smoke Bomb tires get dazzling launch

Unveiling draws most visitors ever to PSB YouTube site

By Dave Mcmahon
Senior Editor

Dealers who sell sport bike tires received a potential game-changer in August when Western Power Sports unveiled the new Shinko 005 Smoke Bomb tires at the WPS headquarters in Boise, Idaho.

In front of a crowd of hundreds of WPS sales reps, vendors and employees, three riders performed burnouts of about 5-10 seconds each, providing a rainbow of smoke in red, green and purple. The video of the event on the Powersports Business YouTube channel received thousands of views in the aftermath of the launch.

The Cherry Bomb (red), Apple Bomb (green) and Blueberry Bomb (purple) tires are black in color, but use technological advances to create the colored smoke.

“It’s insane. The reps are stoked,” Terry Baisley, WPS vice president of sales, said of the new product. “It’s been a year-and-a-half in development and a year of wishing and begging before that. It took a lot of us to make it happen.”

The tires can be smoked until the rider runs the tire down the rim. The tires produce the colored smoke with each burnout.

“You figure every kid on a sport bike out there with his flip-flops, his sunglasses — who should be wearing a helmet — is worried about doing a smoky burnout to attract the beautiful young lady sitting on the corner with her friends,” Baisley said. “This will just enhance their game.”

The tires are DOT street legal and come in 180-17 and 190-17 sizes. They have an MSRP of $249.95. WPS is expecting to ship orders beginning in October.

Baisley was on a flight home from a motorsports event in Asia when he came up with the idea. “I thought, ‘This would be awesome for sport bikes,’ and it went from there,” Baisley said.

Indeed it did. WPS has distributed Shinko, based in Japan, for nearly a decade. Keeping their latest tire product under lock and key proved successful.

“They’re fantastic people at Shinko and they embrace technology real well,” Baisley said. “It was difficult to keep it under wraps, because you want to tell everybody because it’s really, really exciting. I’ve got to say the core people that are on this team that designed this together, we wanted to tell everybody, but we knew we didn’t want to spill our candy in the lobby. It surprised a lot of people, so mission accomplished.”

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The Shinko Smoke Bomb tires were made to turn heads, and they could do exactly that at a dealership, according to Baisley.

“You can smoke this tire until you run out of gas or until you run it down to the rim, and you’re going to get colored smoke, yet the tire is black, so nobody knows it when they’re looking at the tire. That’s what’s so cool about it,” Baisley said.

It’s also cool when riders get caught up in the frenzy and continue to return to a dealership for a new Smoke Bomb tire.

“That’s the intention,” Baisley said. “There’s a lot of expendable, consumable things in what we do and this is something that for the guys doing stunt riding, showing off. Bike nights at the dealership? What a great way to create excitement — for the dealer to bring three of their bikes out there, put one of each color on, bring out a stack of Shinko tires with a big special in conjunction with WPS, and light these bad boys up and watch the tires get sold. And watch everybody have fun. At the end of the day, we want the consumer to have fun because he feeds all of his and we want to make sure this is a good part of his life.”

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