A major problem in road engineering is to understand the mechanisms of friction between rubber and the road. We study road profiles obtained using tactile and laser captors. these profiles belong to different category characterized by different friction coefficients. We find that all our profiles indeed display strong fractal behaviour in terms of both correlation exponents and regularization dimension over a large range of scales. However, neither of these fractal parameters seem to be related to friction. We then use a local fractal parameter, namely the pointwise Holder exponent. We show that this exponent does discriminate profiles which have different friction properties.