Dedicated race tyres are a necessity on racing cars, even in the Nitto 3K Retro Series that we run in. With my Scottish heritage to the fore, we were running on some that were a couple of seasons old, but were now down to the canvas and could not be used any longer!
We had arranged through the good people at B-Quik for some new slick racing tyres, but I was unsure of what we should get. B-Quik MD Henk Kiks, another retro racer himself, told me that Hankook tyres would be good, but I didn’t know just how good (or bad) they might be, never having had any experience with the Hankook brand!
Lap times mean everything in motor racing, as your time in Qualifying determines the starting position for each race. Bolting on the Hankook slicks we went out for Qualifying and returned a time eight seconds a lap faster than we had ever recorded before with our usual tyres. Eight seconds! In motor racing eight seconds is eternity. Eight seconds is around 200 meters at most tracks, so we had left the mid-field cars we used to race against before and were now battling with the bigger cars like the 3 litre racing BMWs. We were ecstatic!
We are so happy with the Hankooks, I have even got a set of their road tyres for the family Fortuner. Thank you B-Quik.
