[island911]

Rather than talk about the nonlinear behavior of visco-elastic material under varying shear rates while energy inputs create nonlinear thermal gradients due aspect ratio of cord length relative to diameter ...

Let's talk bubble gum.

If you are making a bubble gum tire -a relatively small skinny tire- you would want to use old hard bubble gum - like the kind you find stuck to the underside of a table. Reason being that as that tire rolls it massages that big old contact patch -the flat patch much like can be seen on the dragster above. This means that before it starts making hard accelerations it creates heat. --just from rolling along. - at speed this is a big deal. So if you had made that tire from new soft bubble gum it would be really sticky, but it would all get hot fast and fall apart.

If you have a nice wide tire with the same contact patch (same amount of square inches on the pavement) you no longer have to worry about rolling along at speed driving the tire temp up (softening the bubble gum to the point where it slides off) This means that you can have a tire running softer stickier bubble gum. - Sticky for the work of accelerations (cornering, braking...)

Now let's for a moment imaging an old light 911 with that fat tire on the front. (take off the fenders for clearance.) That would be a performance disaster. It would be more like a ski than a tire. Well, at minimum it would be very difficult to bring the tier up to temp where it gets grippy. A fat tire like that needs some heavy loads to come to temp. But at least the aero would be horrible. And imagine driving in the rain, on a rutted highway. (water ski)