(FORTUNE Magazine) – THE TIRE BUSINESS isn't a game of long passes and thrilling broken-field runs but of four-yard advances in clouds of gritty dust. Yet when a team is captained by an all-American like Goodyear Tire & Rubber CEO Stanley Gault, it can be an exciting game nonetheless. And a winning game: Since Gault joined the team in 1991, after 11 brilliant seasons leading the Rubbermaid squad, Goodyear has gone from its first yearly loss in two generations, just before he joined, to 1993's championship earnings of $388 million, second highest in company history. That leaves the other giants in the international league badly behind. Says competitor Hubertus von Gruenberg, chairman of Germany's Continental tire company: ''Stan Gault is setting the world standard of profitability.'' Gault has pursued a double mission during what started as a three-year contract. First -- the old news -- was shrinking and restructuring, selling off inessential businesses, reducing the work force, cutting costs, raising equity, and slashing debt. The $1-million-a-day debt service alone was eating Goodyear alive. Says Gault: ''The company could not survive carrying that horrendous burden.'' As the company was slimming down, Gault attacked the second and really creative task: putting some profitable growth on the board. His strategy: Find and seize the industry's fastest-growing, highest-margin markets. If need be, create them. In a commodity business, that means looking for specialty niches. So Gault set Goodyear's product development people to brew up a flood of new products distinctive enough to command a premium price. In the past two years, 22 creations have tumbled out of the factories, much more than in any previous two-year period in Goodyear's history. Gault understood that, while the automakers who buy about half of Goodyear's tires are sophisticated engineers who specify precisely what they want, the consumers who buy replacement tires can be lured by attractive features that intelligent marketing can divine. For Goodyear developers, this new marketing savvy made all the difference. The marketers discovered not only what consumers wanted but also what the tires should look like. To buy a high- traction tire, says Joe Gingo, vice president for worldwide tire technology, ''the consumer has to look at the tire and say -- traction.'' Everyone knows about Goodyear's first new-product success, the much advertised Aquatred, a tire with a furrow down the center for wet traction. Premium priced, it accounts for 6% of Goodyear's volume and 8.5% of profits. Stiff-arming competitors crowding in with copycats, Goodyear has just introduced the son of Aquatred, a tire boasting not one but two grooves, designed to provide wet traction combined with high performance when dry. Other new-product winners, collectively more important than Aquatred, are much less well known. For the free-spending owners of sports cars, Goodyear has concocted complete sets in which each tire, slightly different, is designed for a specific wheel, so consumers buy them four at a time, not one by one. Tires for four-wheel-drive vehicles offer a jazzy appearance and three bands of tread in differing patterns and materials. The five replacement passenger tire models introduced in 1992 and 1993, though only 14% of unit volume, account for 16.5% of revenues and a spectacular 20% of gross profits. Not all Goodyear's children can be above average; its margin laggards are tires sold to carmakers. But Gault is widening profits on them as well by concentrating on the high-margin, high-performance tires manufacturers put on four-wheel-drive vehicles, vans, and pickups. Goodyear dominates this category, so fast growing it has jumped from 10% of the market in 1987 to 23% today. To boost his replacement-tire business further, Gault changed his retail distribution strategy. Goodyear had sold only through independent dealers, whose business was stagnating. Says Gault: ''Too many people were telling us that it was not convenient for them to purchase Goodyear products, because there wasn't an outlet where they preferred to shop.'' So he started selling through Sears, Wal-Mart, and other mass merchants. Of course the independent dealers protested vehemently, but Goodyear is helping to reenergize them with lots of marketing and advertising support plus all those new products. Result: Sales to dealers rose 2% in 1993, a flat year for the U.S. replacement auto tire market. Gault's contract was to expire in June, but the board has extended it until year-end. He grows vague if asked when he's really leaving: ''We are not going to hold to any specific hour or day.'' Perhaps he'll captain Goodyear for yet one more championship season.

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