The Yokohama Rubber Co., Ltd., is pleased to announce the excellent results achieved by cars running on its ADVAN racing tires at the 101st Pikes Peak International Hill Climb held in Colorado, USA, on June 25. The event’s overall champion, Robin Shute, climbed Pikes Peak in a car equipped with dry-use ADVAN A005 partially made from sustainable materials. The overall championship was the second straight for Shute and Yokohama Rubber, achieving one of the goals of this year’s ADVAN CHALLENGE, which seeks to maximize sales of ADVAN tires during the global flagship brand’s 45th year.
Competing in the Unlimited division, Robin Shute drove his 2018 Wolf TSC-FS to the summit in a sizzling 08:40:080, for a first-place division finish as well as the overall championship. Shute’s 2022 overall championship also was achieved on ADVAN racing tires. This year, his car was equipped with ADVAN A005 tires with the same 33% sustainable materials ratio* as the tires being supplied by Yokohama Rubber as the control tire for this year’s Japanese SUPER FORMULA Championship series, where the tires have demonstrated the same excellent grip performance as standard racing tires. Another car running on ADVAN A005 tires using sustainable materials, Randy Pobst’s 2021 Tesla Model S Plaid, finished second in the Exhibition division. The ADVAN A005 tires on Randy’s car had an even higher renewable material content realized by using biomass rubber in the tires’ sidewalls. These excellent results demonstrated Yokohama Rubber’s advanced technologies’ ability to create tires using sustainable materials that deliver excellent driving performance while also being environmentally friendly.
Many other drivers competing in cars equipped with standard ADVAN tires also achieved excellent results at Pikes Peak. Tanner Foust drove his 2023 Radford Type 62-2 to a first place finish in the Exhibition division. Codie Vahsholtz was first in the Open Wheel division in his 2013 Ford Open Vahsholtz Custom, and David Donohue and his 2019 Porsche GT2 RS Clubsport finished first in the Time Attack 1 division. Meanwhile, Hayden Bradley captured the trophy in the Porsche Pikes Peak Trophy by Yokohama division, in which all entrants race in Porsches equipped with YOKOHAMA’s A052 tires. In addition to the five division champions, one of whom also claimed the overall championship, Yokohama Rubber is proud to have supported several other drivers competing in this year’s Pikes Peak hill climb by supplying them with ADVAN racing tires (see Table below).
The Pikes Peak International Hill Climb is a hill climb race with a long and illustrious history dating back to 1916. It is also known as the “Race to the Clouds”, as the course starts at 2,862 meters above sea level and covers about 20 kilometers before reaching the finish line at an altitude of 4,300 meters. Cars equipped with YOKOHAMA tires captured the overall championship in 2020 and 2022.
Under Yokohama Rubber’s three-year (2021–2023) medium-term management plan, Yokohama Transformation 2023 (YX2023), the consumer tire business aims to maximize the sales ratios of high-value-added YOKOHAMA tires, namely the global flagship ADVAN brand, the GEOLANDAR brand of tires for SUVs and pickup trucks, and various winter tires. The plan also positions participation in motorsports activities as crucial to Yokohama Rubber’s development of advanced tire technologies and strengthening of its ADVAN and GEOLANDAR brands. The company’s development of high-performance an
d top-quality tires for new cars and the replacement market benefits from the technologies accumulated through its participation in a wide variety of motorsports events in Japan and around the globe, from top-category races to grassroots races.
Yokohama Rubber also is promoting sustainability initiatives based on the concept of “Caring for the Future.” The company believes that conducting its business activities aligned with these sustainability initiatives will help resolve social issues and lead to the continued increase of its corporate value. One goal of Yokohama Rubber’s sustainability initiatives is to contribute to the realization of a circular economy. Toward that end, Yokohama Rubber aims to increase the ratio of renewable and recyclable materials used by the Company to more than 30% of total materials used by 2030 and then raise that ratio to 100% in 2050.
* The 33% sustainable materials ratio has been achieved by using natural rubber, various naturally derived compounding agents, such as oil from oil palm fruit nuts and orange peels, recycled iron, rubber recycled from waste tires, and synthetic rubber made using the mass-balance method.
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