It is a tradition for us to  have a meet up during the many  festive holidays that our multi national country celebrates. For this Hari Raya we had a  gathering in Sunway for a mini Wangan session to a secret location  😉 . Bringing the panda AE86 to  a meet such as this ,perfectly  exemplify the term ‘ Bringing a knife to a gun fight‘  especially in the presences of 500WHP Skylines ,Type Rs and a couple of souped up Hondas!

However there was a reason for this . I was given a set of ,         Goodyear DuraPlus to do a review a while back. Testing it in drift application had me using up the rear but the fronts we still as good as new! I had actually bought an extra pair of DuraPlus and found that this gathering was a perfect opportunity to test these tires under these condition. Being H rated tires, the Goodyear DuraPlus’s maximum recommended speed rating is about 210Km/h which is about as fast as my AE86 could go. As this test was being conducted by the seat of my pants ,without the aid of any form of scientific measuring device ,all I could conclude was

A)Low tire noise. while this fact may not bother some performance orientated drivers , I do find that the lack of humming or noise emitting from the tires gives me more confidence traveling at speed. Furthermore, the lack of tire noise allows you to hear other things that might be a warning or tell tale  signs on your car’s condition (ie: pinging)

B)Structural integrity; as expected , the tires did not developed an form of thread deformity or such after a number of high speed runs. This doesn’t come as a surprise as we had found similar results during our drift testing , which I believe is more abusive to tires!

C) Less rolling resistance. To be perfectly honest, the sensation of having less rolling resistance may just be a psychological effect from reading the product brochure 🙂 But somehow I felt the car was a lot smoother at 33 psi pressure in the tires  compared to the others I have tested. So don’t flame me on this 😛  One good indication of the lack of rolling resistance is from the fuel economy performance but i think  you’ll understand that in this case there’s an exception

Anyways here are the pictures of the cars that turned up that night