.jpg)
Hankook chief financial officer Hyun Bum Cho said he had held talks with F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone about supplying tyres to the premier motorsport category. "Bernie Ecclestone has had trouble with tyres and we have talked to him personally a few times, but we have decided not to go with the program, because it will take time and he needed a tyre very quickly," he said.
"But we had a very good talk and maybe we will participate in the future. But not more than in to two three years." Cho, who launched the South Korean company's motorsport program 10 years ago, said the company, which spends about 3 per cent of its sales revenue on marketing, needed to become involved in the "top categories" of world motorsports.
"Right now we have a little Le Mans team and some rally teams here and there," he said. "The worldwide motorsport market is about 2 million a year which is quite profitable because motorsport tyres are quite expensive.
"So we need to be in WRC, F1 or the top end of Le Mans. "In future we need to be in those but it will cost a lot of money."
He said Hankook was well poised to be in premium motorsport categories because it was the seventh-biggest tyre manufacturer in the world, most of the companies above it were either old or disinterested and the Japanese brands did not have the money to participate.
"So it is quite obvious that in the motorsport field we are emerging as a new rising star," he said. Hankook Tyre Australia managing director Paul Park said the company was represented at the Bathurst 12 Hour race, where they finished fourth in difficult weather conditions.
"That race was the Australian motorsport debut of our Ventus TD semi-slick road-spec tyre," he said. The same tyre was recently used by Dean Evans on his Mitsubishi Evo when he finished 10th outright at Targa Tasmania and scored a hat-trick of results when the United States race team Sierra Sierra finished second at the World Time Attack Challenge in Sydney.
Their fastest time was within a second of the Eastern Creek lap record for a V8 Supercar on full racing slicks. "this motorsport expertise can be found in our new Ventus R-S3," he said. "This is an example of the old saying that motorsport improves the breed.
"We believe it will also, ultimately, improve our sales in Australia." Although the Korean giant now supplies tyres as original equipment to many of the world's luxury brands, don't expect to see their tyres on supercars soon.
Hankook CEO Seung Hwa Suh said they had been approached by a supercar company to supply tyres, but they had declined. He wouldn't name the company or either confirm whether it was Italian, English, Swedish, Japanese, American or German.
"It is a privilege to us (to have been asked), but we are not yet at that stage," he said. "Profitability is good but the development costs are very high."
.jpg)
