Comment by mrguyorama

>In some motorsports you want tires with no tread (slicks)

You are wrong.

Laws prohibit selling used tires because the consumable part of the tire that contains the part engineered to safely interact with the road is used up. That part happens to contain the tread.

A "slick" for racing is not a tire that has had the tread worn down FFS. A "slick" still has a significant quantity of rubber engineered to wear down over use as you drive on it.

If you are using a used up tire in place of an actual racing tire, what you are doing is cheaping out on safety.

A tire worn down to the tread wear indicator or similar is only useful as a burnout tire.

Cheaping out on safety in auto racing is so damn stupid that even the 24 Hours of Lemons race, which bans cars that cost more than 500$ with all upgrades, excludes safety equipment from that calculation and requires thousands of dollars of safety equipment.

Exactly because of situations like this, where people who say they "Know what they are doing" just don't.

>ut the law prohibits the sale because it takes no account of the context.

The law prohibits it because every dumb asshole who thinks the government is an evil bogeyman like this will insist on buying worn out tires "For racing" and putting them on their daily driver and people will die. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestone_and_Ford_tire_contro... for what happens when tires are even just a little messed up, and how it killed 238 people in the US alone. Both companies involved BTW neglected to inform the NHTSA about the issues they knew existed, because people dying in their vehicles while they point fingers around is more profitable than doing a recall