[CapriRacer]

I'm going to start in a completely different place.

Please note, I am only going to talk about the US based tire standardization organization - The Tire and Rim Association (TRA). I am also only going to talk about Standard Load Passenger Car tires. I am not going to talk about metric based tire systems or Extra Load (XL) tires. Those are done similarly, but talking about them just complicates things

TRA sets the max pressure. They indicate that only 35 psi, 44 psi, and 51 psi are acceptable max tire pressures for Standard Load Passenger Car (SL PC) tires.

If you look at the load tables, you'll notice that for SL PC tires, the load maxes out at 35 psi. Please note that it doesn't matter if the tire says 44 psi max or 51 psi max on the sidewall. The load table is the same.

From an engineering perspective, tires are all about fatigue - and one of the principles of Fatigue is that if you make something stronger, it takes more cycles before it fails. So plies are made considerably stronger than 35 psi requires - about 4 or 5 times as strong.

That means a 35 psi rated tire should burst at about 140 to 175 psi - and that's about where that happens.

And remembering that tires marked 44 psi max or 51 psi max are built like 35 psi tires, you now have a picture of the relationship between max pressure and burst pressure.