Endless Runner Tips: How to Roll Farther in Istanbul Tyre

The secret of a long run in Istanbul Tyre is that the tyre is always slowing down, so every car on the road is fuel. On an empty highway with full air, a runaway tyre falls over after 1,222 meters, just as it reaches the Bosphorus Bridge. Riding in the slipstream of the vehicles ahead, pulling out late for slingshots and keeping air in the tyre is what carries it across the bridge and into the city. We built Istanbul Tyre, so we measured every tip below with the game’s own rules and 2,700 test runs.

How Istanbul Tyre works

Istanbul Tyre is a 3D endless runner in which you play a tyre that breaks loose from a truck on the Northern Marmara Highway, north of Istanbul. The tyre rolls forward on its own. You steer it between the lanes, jump over small cars, bounce off their roofs and lie flat to roll under parked trailers. The route never ends: 1,200 meters of highway, 600 meters across the Bosphorus Bridge, 1,400 meters through the city, then back onto the highway.

A run ends in one of four ways: the tyre crashes into a vehicle, blows out after a hit, goes flat slowly, or runs out of speed and falls on its side. That last one is what makes the game different from most runners. The tyre has no engine, so it loses speed every second you do nothing about it.

The controls are simple. On a phone you drag your finger and the tyre follows it, tap to jump and swipe down to lie flat. On a computer the arrow keys steer, the up arrow or Space jumps, the down arrow lies flat and E fires the special power of your tyre.

What we measured

We used two kinds of tests. For speed and air we ran the game’s own speed rules with nothing else on the road, which gives exact numbers. For everything else, a computer player drove the real game in traffic: it reacts a quarter of a second late, misjudges distances a little, jumps over small cars when it has to and, in two of the three play styles, chases slipstreams. It played every tyre 100 times in each style, on the same 100 traffic patterns, for 2,700 runs in total.

A computer player is not a human. It steers mechanically and never learns a route, so treat its distances as a fair comparison between tyres and tactics, not as a target. A good human player rolls farther.

Why the tyre keeps slowing down

Every run starts at 86 km/h. Two forces slow the tyre all the time: rolling resistance, which is strongest at low speed, and air drag, which grows with the square of the speed. Below 47 km/h the speed warning flashes, and at 32 km/h the tyre wobbles and falls over.

Air pressure matters more than it looks. A soft tyre rolls badly: at half air the rolling resistance is 60% higher, and on an empty tyre it would be more than double. That is why the same empty road gives very different distances:

The tyre also leaks 0.4% air per second, so a full tyre that is never hit goes flat after 250 seconds, a little over four minutes. Scrapes and potholes take much bigger bites, which is why blowouts end more runs than slow leaks.

Each tyre also has its own top speed. Air drag grows quickly near it, and a boost that pushes you past it fades within a second or two. Only nitro, and the Courier Motorbike’s wheelie, which works like nitro, raise the limit by 35%.

Every speed boost and loss

There are only a few ways to get speed back, and the biggest one is free: the slipstream. In real racing, drafting behind another vehicle cuts the air drag. In Istanbul Tyre it pushes you forward. Get within 15 meters of a moving vehicle in your lane and the pull starts; it gets stronger as you close in and is at full strength from 3 meters. At full strength the tyre goes from 86 to 158 km/h in 4.7 seconds behind a car, and in 3.7 seconds behind a bus or a truck, which pull 25% harder.

The other gains are instant. The chart shows what each move adds or costs, straight from the game rules:

The slipstream pays in points too. Points grow with speed and distance, and in a full slipstream every meter is worth 1.8 times as much behind a car and twice as much behind a bus or a truck. Tricks add to a combo that multiplies your points by up to three, but the combo resets if you go 3.2 seconds without a new trick or scrape a car.

10 Istanbul Tyre tips that hold up

1. Treat every car as fuel

A tyre with no help stops after 1,222 meters. When our computer player only dodged, 265 of its 900 runs ended with the tyre running out of speed. When it looked for slipstreams, only 44 did, and it rolled 23% farther in total, with gains of 13% to 62% on six of the nine tyres. Never cruise alone in an empty lane for long: look ahead for the next car to tuck in behind.

2. Pull out late for a slingshot

Leaving a slipstream when you are less than 4.5 meters from the car is a slingshot: +12.6 km/h at once, plus bolts and points. Leave too early and you get nothing; leave too late and you hit the car. Our computer player managed about two slingshots a minute. At 100 km/h with full air, one slingshot undoes about 15 seconds of slowing down.

3. Follow buses and trucks, but not with the Excavator

Big vehicles pull 25% harder and double your points per meter, so they are the best slipstream on the road. The exception is the Excavator Tyre. It crushes small cars but cannot crush a bus or a truck, and it is the slowest tyre to turn. When our computer player chased slipstreams with it, runs got shorter (1,796 m down to 1,381 m), and the runs that ended against a bus, a truck or a lorry went up from 47 to 63 out of 100. With the Excavator, ride behind small cars or simply roll over them.

4. Keep your air above half

Full air coasts 1,222 meters, half air only 875. A soft tyre also loses a scrape or a pothole faster, and blowouts ended 15% of all our runs. Patches give back 40% and a compressor fills the tyre and slows the leak for eight seconds. Take them before the low air warning at 35%, not after.

5. Do not scrape cars

Brushing the side of a car costs 9 km/h and 13 to 26% air, depending on the tyre. That is a whole slingshot gone, and it also resets your combo. The Courier Motorbike is the one exception: its Lane Splitter skill lets it scrape small cars for only 3.6 km/h and no air.

6. Always keep one jump

You have three jumps, and each one takes 2.2 seconds to refill. Crashes ended 68% of our runs, and the usual crash is a small car appearing in front of you when you have no jump left. Jump for roofs and bolts with the first two, keep the third for emergencies.

7. Bounce on roofs, and time the bounce

Landing on a car roof bounces you up again instead of ending the run, and pressing jump right as you land is a perfect bounce worth +2.9 km/h. Chained bounces go higher each time. Land on a bus or a truck and you ride on top of it for a while, above the traffic.

8. Lie flat under trailers, slam in the air

Parked trailers block a lane, but a lying tyre rolls under them. Swipe down or press the down arrow before you reach one. The same move in the air slams the tyre down onto whatever is below it.

9. Collect close shaves on the way

Let a car pass within 50 centimeters for a close shave (+4.3 km/h), within 22 centimeters for a razor-close shave (+6.5 km/h). They are smaller than a slingshot but they add up, and each one feeds the combo. With the Dolmuş Tyre every shave and slingshot counts double for bolts and points.

10. Use movement powers at once, save the rest for a blocked road

The Courier Motorbike’s wheelie is also a five-second nitro: with the wheelie fired as soon as it was ready, our computer player’s median run grew from 2,160 m to 3,135 m. The Dolmuş Tyre’s Pull Over (1,325 m to 1,744 m) and the Private Jet’s Takeoff (2,026 m to 2,245 m) helped too. The homing simit and the siren act on the cars ahead, and fired at random they did not help (1,589 m to 1,364 m for the Simit Cart Wheel, 2,509 m to 2,334 m for the Ambulance). Keep those two for a road that is about to close.

Ready to try it? Play Istanbul Tyre in your browser. It works on phones and computers, with nothing to download.

Which tyre rolls farthest

Every tyre has a passive skill that is always on and a special power that recharges during the run. The chart shows how far the computer player rolled with each one when it rode slipstreams and used the power whenever it was ready.

Prices are in bolts. The Taxi and Truck powers (double points, magnet) earn more but do not change how far you roll, so their last two columns are equal.

What the numbers say about each tyre:

• Truck Tyre (free): tough and steady. It loses less air in scrapes and potholes, and its Magnet pulls in nearby bolts.
• Simit Cart Wheel (600): a light wheel that earns 2 extra bolts on every bounce. It is the most fragile tyre, so blowouts ended a third of its runs; grab every patch.
• Dolmuş Tyre (1,200): the best early buy. Pull Over clears small cars from the lane ahead, and slingshots and shaves pay double.
• Taxi Tyre (2,000): crosswind and oil cannot move it, and the Taximeter doubles bolts and points for eight seconds. Use it for missions and high scores.
• Courier Motorbike (3,000): the longest runs by far: it turns quickly, scrapes small cars for free and its wheelie is a five-second nitro. Save for it.
• Metrobus Tyre (4,500): it gets 15% air back every 500 meters and its Bus Lane clears your lane for seven seconds, but it turns slowly. It suits a player who plans lanes early; our mechanical player crashed it into small cars most often.
• Private Jet Tyre (6,000): the highest top speed and the highest jump, with a slow glide. Takeoff flies over everything for three seconds.
• Ambulance Tyre (8,000): survives one crash per run and can jump three times in the air. It gave the longest runs of all when the computer player rode slipstreams without using the siren.
• Excavator Tyre (12,000): the fun one. It crushes small cars, ignores potholes and its Scoop throws everything in the next 60 meters into the air. It is the slowest tyre, so it is about chaos and points, not distance.

How fast you earn bolts

Bolts lie on the road, and tricks, slingshots and shaves add more. With the Truck Tyre our computer player earned a median 113 bolts per run. At that rate the Simit Cart Wheel takes about 5 runs and the Dolmuş Tyre about 11. Missions speed it up: three wait in the garage at a time, such as reaching the Bosphorus Bridge or making four slingshots in one run, and each pays 70 to 600 bolts.

After a crash you can continue with a spare tyre: the first one costs 250 bolts, then 500 and 1,000, up to three per run. A spare is worth it when you are close to a mission goal or a new best; otherwise the bolts bring a new tyre closer.

The route: highway, bridge and city

The road repeats every 3,200 meters, and each part plays a little differently:

• Northern Marmara Highway (0 to 1,200 m): trees, morning traffic and the first slipstreams. Learn the lanes here.
• Bosphorus Bridge (1,200 to 1,800 m): the sea and the Istanbul skyline on both sides, ferries below. The real Bosphorus Bridge is 1,560 meters long; in the game you cross it in about 600.
• The city (1,800 to 3,200 m): buildings, mosques and billboards, then the road loops back onto the highway.

A breaking news ticker follows the tyre all the way. It reports the first traffic camera sighting at 250 meters, “#IstanbulTyre is trending” at 1 kilometer, seagulls chasing the tyre at 1.5 kilometers, and finally “Tyre declared the fastest vehicle in Istanbul” at 10 kilometers. When the run ends, your own story appears as a news card you can share.