It would seem irrational to fail a car at MOT just because its tyres are not 140mph rated when the national speed limit is 70mph.
As said, don't believe its checked at MOT.
However, the engineers who specified this have gone to great lengths, as its not just as simple as "its a 115mph car, so T rating will do". Check many sub 118mph cars, you will find they are specified with H or even V rated tyres - my 115mph Rover 25 actually specified V rated, even though it stood no chance of even getting to limits of T rated, let alone H, on pure speed alone.
Again, back to the Rover 25, when I wrote it off, the tyres were checked by the assessor (or in this case I think it was actually the salvage place, as no doubt it was a write-off) for tread depth, tyre size, speed and load ratings, amongst may other things... ...admittedly, this was a few days before one of the other driver's insurance finally agreed full fault, so my insurance were probably going through the motions of getting out of paying
. Given the questions I was asked, and some of the documents I had to provide, I now make sure I'm sqeaky clean on declaring any mods to insurance companies.
When the assessor came round to assess the bike after it was destroyed in the garage explosion, he showed me what he had to fill out (along with a comment along the lines of "how the hell I'm I going to do this" - there was next to nothing left of the bike, I'd pulled out the front forks, then chain sprockets, the crankshaft and the petrol tank, which was about all that remained), and that had pre-printed on it the tyre sizes (amongst other stuff like Alarm: No etc). Don't recall if that had speed ratings etc on the form though.
But fact remains, the manufacturers spec it for a reason, and if you decide not to obey, you do need to inform your insurance. The V rated tyres on the Rover 25 were a couple of quid more expensive than the H rated ones of same size, but ultimately I'm glad I always paid the little bit extra, as I'm utterly convinced my insurance company would have used that to not pay out.
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Topic: Tyre load rating (Read 3906 times)