Guy's,

Thank you for your words! I'm coming from another stream (Sketchup) and there was really simple. I know, SU is not comparable with Maya! But UV mapping is really a dark edge in my Maya knowledge. Everything that I start in Maya is reaching the end when it's come to mapping textures!

Today I started again with the tire and it seems not bad except the fact that the tread mapping looks not real as the texture is to stretched. But with this piece of texture I have it seems not possible to texture the tread. That is also one of my problems: how big must be a texture in order to look realistic after have textured the object?
There are a lot of tire pictures on the internet but not as frontal shot. Is there a possibility to take one and then distort it as long as the picture is straight?

Here the result of my try: not really god....