I was offered the opportunity to visit the Yokohama Tire Plant in Salem, Virginia this week and of course I jumped at the chance. I got up bright and early and headed up 220N without knowing much of what the day would bring. It had been raining for the past few days and I knew there was a pretty good chance of rain throughout the day and that part of the plan was a "Ride & Drive." So, fully expecting a rainy washout I comforted myself with the fact that even though this is my first Ride & Drive I've heard they never really have any cool cars for you to drive—no cool cars for a Formula-Red-Bleeding-Honda-Loving guy anyways (mine bleeds a slightly juicier Milano Red shade, but you know what I mean). Thankfully my pessimism started to wane as I pulled into Roanoke and the clouds began lifting and the sun began to peek through. Being a fairly frequent visitor of the area I recognized all the usual landmarks on Electric Road but when I turned onto Indiana Street I was shocked at how absolutely ginormous the building is (1.25 million sq/ft) and equally surprised by the fact that I had driven by so many times without ever noticing it.
We started off the morning with a super interesting and informative class on the art of tire making. To quote our instructor, "There is more technology in a modern radial tire than the building of the Golden Gate Bridge." I don't know much about bridge building but after that class I do know a lot about tire construction and I would guess that his quote is probably pretty accurate.
Next came the tour of the plant. Keep your hands inside the vehicle at all times, don't touch anything, and by far the hardest order to go along with; no photos. We started at the beginning where the rubber compounds were being mixed and followed the process all the way down to the shipping dock.
They had the Super Street Civic Si with their Yokohama Parada Spec 2's on it in their display case right inside the front door (I've got one of these at home that has become my 10-month old son's favorite toy).
After our brains were full and our legs were tired we headed over to the Salem Civic Center for the second half of the day. This is the part where things got a lot more exciting. The car we would spend the afternoon flogging was the new
Scion FR-S. Toyota/Scion/Subaru have done an excellent job of hyping this car so that even I was pretty well informed about this car through all the pre-release buzz that's surrounded it.
We started off in car #1 on Avid Ascends then moved onto car #2 which was fitted with the impressive Avid ENvigor's. Then cars #3 & #4 were a lot more fun with car #3 sporting the S.drive's and car #4 wearing the uber-awesome Advan Neova AD08's (below on the BBS).
Even with the Scion's being the center of attention it's impossible to get away from Big Red. :) (Elite 80 & EU3000is)
The rain held off for the afternoon and we had beautiful cloud cover for our high speed parking lot shenanigans.
As we wrapped things up for the day it was pretty clear that I wasn't taking home any medals (in my defense I thought we were going for fastest lap so I little-old-ladied my first lap on the Ascends so as to feel out the course—instead it was an average of all four timed laps. oops!). 1st place would have been pretty hard to obtain anyways with the cutthroat approach of guys leaving parking brakes partially engaged, a/c's switched on, and realizing the cone penalties weren't being fully enforced. Holy moly, guys are so competitive!
The folks at Yokohama really are top-notch and I appreciate all the work they put into making this day both informative and fun.
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