ZC Rubber held the Westlake winter tire test at the Arctic Driving Center, which is a popular place for tire performance test of many world famous tire companies and has accumulated 30-year long experiences in tire performance test so far. Also it is remarkable in some points that the given report by ZC RUBBER showed.

Starting in January 2015, the German Westlake team planned the winter tire test session to compare actual Westlake winter products with competitors. After preparing for several months, everything was set up, including a nearly 4 kilometers circuit with all areas of winter test procedures: circle with 200 meters diameter, handling session, braking zone from 50 km/h to zero, a 18 meters distance slalom, a hill climb session of 15% etc.

Each testing group consisted of the base tire and two other products. Volkswagen Golf TSI, the three front-wheel test cars, had a locally made tire as base product (100%) and an international brand tire as base for BMW 316i, which is rear wheel drive. The base tire results would reveal that if the track may change by weather, temperatures etc.

The test candidates for the Golf were 195/65 R 15 in SW 606 studded, SW 608, SW 618 and other famous tires. For the BMW, the tires were 205/55 R 16 SW 606 studded, SW 618 and other well-known brands’ tires.

Every car drove with two people who would change the seats after every two laps, then changing the test car. The pilot had to drive constantly to get best results and the copilot must measure all the times, noting these results on a sheet for analysis. All subjective remarks from the drivers were also noticed.

The test result showed by ZC Rubber is notable and available. The studded tires like the SW 606, the Finland home-made tires had no advantage on snowy roads, only on black ice. Every modern tire with intelligent sipes had better results than the studded tires.

The test winner on snowy condition in both dimensions and on both sort of cars was the SW 618, which was a big surprise for ZC Rubber. Fast and secure on all winter surfaces like snow and ice. The SW 618 was really convincing on snow and even on ice. This tire has hugh potential on winter roads and is on the same level as the best European tires or even higher. It has a very smooth pattern mixture so that it will not reach the best results on dry surface sand mileage. However, ZC Rubber will do further tests on both wet and dry conditions with some of the candidates in the near future.