With the tread issue, I saw a tut somewhere, sorry can't remember where, but it talked about parenting the tracks to a simple circle, and deform the track/circle combo to the shape you want via a lattice, and the tracks were animated by the driver of the circle rotation within the lattice.
Sorry... does that make any sense?
Israel "Izzy" Long
Motion and Title Design for Broadcast-Film-DS
izzylong.com