Kevin McNulty
Former Editor, Mud Life
We are always up for testing new tires. In fact, it's one of the highlights of our work. So when we heard that a new brand of tire had a mud-terrrain, we jumped at the chance to run it through its paces. The Fierce Attitude M/T is designed with large, unique tread blocks and wide voids to be an aggressive mudder.
The Attitude M/T tire is a good all-around mud tire that's also highway-friendly. The trick to building a good mud-terrain is to build it with quality materials for long life and durability in harsh terrain, and a design with an aggressive tread pattern that provides good off-road traction in a number of conditions. If the tire is going to be driven on and off the highway, it should also be designed for stability and safety at highway speeds.
After a day of rigorous testing in a tough desert, we found that the Attitude M/T offered good traction, and it was well mannered on hundreds of highway miles during the drive to and from our inhospitable test location.
Fierce's new Attitude M/T radial tire features wide tread blocks, which mean more contact with the ground, and more total biting edges with staggered shoulder blocks. The tire's siping is engineered to aid traction in wet conditions, while the wide and deep voids should allow the tire to self-clean in snow and mud.
The Attitude is available in 16-, 17-, and 18-inch wheel sizes and in diameters from 28 inches (16-inch wheel size) to 35. At 15 psi we found that the tire provided good floatation in sand and didn't dig in and get stuck while stopping and starting in the soft stuff.
This mud-terrain tire is constructed with one nylon, two polyester, and two steel belts in the tread, and two polyester sidewall belts. The tire also features triangular sidewall protectors, which provide additional traction when the tire is aired down.
The large, self-cleaning shoulder blocks with wide voids help evacuate debris better and provide a biting grip around rocks. The tires seemed to resist damage from jagged rocks, stones, and sharp debris very well. After wheeling around the desert for the day, we didn't notices any substantial chipping, cutting, or chunking of the tread blocks.
