Hankook chief financial officer Hyun Bum Cho last year said he had held talks with F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone about supplying tyres to the premier motorsport category. However, the first major motorsport category to be running on Korean rubber will be the German touring car series, DTM.
Hankook has previously focused on long-distance sports car events, last year finishing second at the Nurburgring 24-Hour race with a Ferrari F430 GT2 co-driven by Bathurst 1000 invitee Allan Simonsen.
Now the company has announced an exclusive three-year contract with DTM, including Audi, Mercedes and the new BMW teams. The DTM series is based in Germany but also races in Austria, China, England, Netherlands and Spain.
The seventh-biggest tyre manufacturer in the world plans to move into other major racing categories in the next few 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 two million (tyres) 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."
Hankook Tyre Australia marketing assistant William Ng says DTM "will form the core of Hankook's motor sport activities". "Other forms of motorsport may be entered into if they are in line with our strategic goals," he says.
Their tyres have been used in the Bathurst 12-Hour race, but when asked if the V8 Supercar series is in their sights, he replied: "No comment at the moment."
Hankook Tyre Australia managing director Paul Park says Hankook is well poised to be in premium motorsport categories because most of the bigger companies are either "old or disinterested" and the Japanese brands do 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.
