T.J., aka “The Tyre Guy,” cut his teeth in the tire industry in the early 2000s working as a field engineer at Bridgestone Americas. As a hobby (which remains to this day in true tire enthusiast fashion), T.J. would go to new car lots and inspect the tires, snapping pictures of anomalies that caught his eye and sending them to the Bridgestone corporate office. This behavior caught the attention of a Bridgestone executive in Japan, Katsu Kajimoto, who convinced T.J. to move to the Land of the Rising Sun to take on what became a variety of roles, including those in motorcycle and kart tire R&D and engineering management with Firestone’s light truck products.
Eventually, T.J. landed in Firestone’s consumer and government product division, and that’s when he started becoming the go-to guy for police organizations looking for answers when a tire blew out.
“In their report, they would say ‘well, the tire just blew out.’ I thought it was a better idea to train them to know why it blew out. What was the root cause analysis? What were other causes and evidence that you saw on the tire?” he says. “And, that just took off. I mean, that just got ridiculous.”
So ridiculous, in fact, that T.J. ended up retiring from Bridgestone to start what he referred to as his “essentially real-life-NCIS” tire investigation consultant business in 2018. In addition, T.J. has also built a bit of an empire out of divulging his vast tire analysis and forensics wisdom to not just law enforcement officers, but also tire dealers, technicians, courtroom lawyers and anyone else who wants to learn his secrets, via classes he calls “productions.”
