New Continental SportContact 6 tyres land in SA
The right shoes for the job: Continental’s new SportContact 6 tyres.
Imagine Usain bolt running the 100m sprint without his famous Puma spikes? Surely he would still be fast but he wouldn’t perform at his level best. What his shoes do for him is to provide optimum grip and support during that critical race. The same goes for performance cars and tyres. Having the right tyres is crucial to get the most out of your car. Without them, the car won’t perform at its best.
Continental is a brand known for making very good performance tyres and they have recently launched a new version of the SportContact range. The 6th generation Continental tyre has three key elements to it that ensure performance and longevity.
Black Chili Compound: This magic substance ensures malleability in the tyre and provides excellent grip on varying surfaces. This compound has been highly effective in the motorcycle world, where bikers need a tyre that will allow them to stop on a dime.
Vectoring: A new tread pattern that allows elements such as water to flow out of the tyre smoothly, so that maximum grip is still achieved in poor weather.
Aralon 350: A specialised thread in the tyre that further adds to the stability of the car and helps achieve the SportContact 6’s high speed rating of 350 km/h.
After considering all these factors, it is quite clear that the new SportContact 6 is a tyre for extreme high performance cars. Most cars in the class have a rim size of 19 inch and above and that is why the SportContact 6 is available from 19 inch upwards.
Theory into reality:
To test the claimed attributes of the new tyre we drove a 280kW Merecedes-Benz A45 super-hatch, fitted with the new tyres. Of course a car like the A4 has massive amounts of mechanical grip with its four wheel drive system. So to see just how good the tyres are we did a high speed left to right swerve test at 140km/h and surprisingly the car was very composed. The A45 also has the ability to understeer into corners if too much speed is carried into a bend, but even when we purposely did this, the car had much more grip than expected on the SportContact 6’s.
Clearly then the Continental’s are effective at their purpose, a purpose very critical to safety and driver enjoyment. One cannot stress the factor that tyres play when it comes to big machines such as performance cars. Often one makes the mistake of thinking it is wise to save a few Rands by opting for a cheaper but unproven tyres.
But what is the cost of doing so? Well imagine if Usain did not have custom made racing spikes for his million dollar feet? He would probably lose out on a few tenths of a second and probably not have the world record for the 100m sprint. Similarly we are also in a race, the race of life. High performance vehicles can sprint to 100 km/h in record times, but stopping these machines from high speed is what counts. With the right tyres one can also save a few tenths of a second by stopping faster, which translates to stopping closer too. In a crucial situation, every inch counts and tyres like the new Continental SportContact 6 can be the difference you’re looking for.
