[DT] TESTED No. 51

This article originally featured in the August 2022 issue. 

We’ll admit it: we love tires.

Tires can make or break the cosmetic aspect of a truck build. And with the variety of weather and road conditions we face over 12 months, tires are critical.

In our backyard of eastern Idaho, we can see temps in the high 90s, snow, ice, rain, dirt, gravel, mud and sand. And that’s just in June.

Our test truck, a 2020 Ford F350 Power Stroke crew cab (@f350soup on Instagram), racks up about 26,000 miles a year. Half of that is winter driving, and most of that winter driving includes towing a 12,000-pound gooseneck snowmobile trailer. Our summer months include a lot of city and highway, with a considerable number of dirt roads as we search out all those places that lack other people.

We’ve tested more than 20 different light truck tires in the A/T, R/T and M/T categories. Our latest test: The Renegade R/T from Radar Tires.

Radar Tires falls under the Omni United brand, which also manufactures Patriot Tires and a few other brands overseas. Radar’s Renegade R/T is the brand’s rugged terrain flagship that features some pretty cool design and technology–notably, wide center tread blocks, siping and stepped edges, and dual-sidewall designs.

We ran the Renegade R/T in a 37x13.50R18 through the test period and played around with tire pressures of 38psi, 40psi, 45psi and 50 psi, settling on 40psi as our optimal pressure for ride quality, tread wear and handling. Obviously, the sticker on your door will tell you to run 75psi, which is probably good if you’re maxing out at 30,000-pound GCWR. But for daily driving with large tire

That said, the Radar Renegade R/Ts have fantastic ride quality, well beyond expectations in this category. For tires that retail considerably less than, say, Nitto Ridge Grapplers, the Renegade R/Ts ride great.

We like the choice we get from dual sidewalls as well. You get two distinctly different looks, which is a cool option to have.