The Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2R: A tyre that pushes the envelope

Michelin’s fastest street-legal tyre

The Pilot Sport Cup 2R is a very special tyre – it’s designed to excel on the track and is still legal for road use. Its semi-slick design and high-tech compounds give it the kind of grip and precision needed for sports cars, supercars and experienced drivers. It’s known affectionately as the “lap-time smasher”.

The Pilot Sport Cup 2R is Michelin’s street, track and competition tyre and is designed to give high-performance vehicles a competitive edge. It’s the first street-legal tyre to use a special rubber compound that’s developed for racing tyres – an innovation derived from Michelin’s motorsport experience which is available to the consumer market.   

A tyre on the cutting edge

The tread profile is asymmetrical with an outer shoulder that has fewer notches and a reduced void ratio (groove area vs contact area). This ensures that more rubber is in contact with the road and provides an enhanced grip in dry conditions. This also adds a degree of stiffness to withstand higher forces when cornering, allowing for greater steering precision. The larger tread on the inner shoulder, with deep lateral notches, is designed to optimise grip on wet roads by eliminating water on the footprint.

The Pilot Sport Cup 2R has appropriately impressive looks too. It features Michelin’s velvet sidewall markings that give it a uniquely chic appearance, which is ideally suited to the elegance of the world’s premium high-performance cars.

A record-setter

We developed the Pilot Sport Cup 2R in partnership with some of the world’s leading car manufacturers such as Porsche and Ferrari. Subsequent tests with various vehicles have demonstrated significantly improved lap times (an average of 0.5 sec/km on the Nürburgring Nordschleife in Germany) and set three new speed records. 

In July 2019, the Jaguar XE SV Project 8, the world’s fastest sedan, used the Cup 2R to set a blistering new record at the Nürburgring of 7 minutes, 18.361 seconds – 2.9 seconds faster than the previous record and seven seconds faster than any other four-door production car. 

A few months earlier, the Pilot Sport Cup 2R slashed a production car lap record at the Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta circuit in the US which was fitted on a Porsche 911 GT2 RS. It set a phenomenal time of 1:24:88 minutes on a 4.09km track.   

Get in touch with your local Michelin dealer to learn more and find out if the Pilot Sport Cup 2R is a match for your vehicle.