A Subaru Impreza STI fitted with Sailun studded Ice Blazer winter tires drifting on Montreal’s iCar track.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
A couple of years ago, I replaced the worn Bridgestone Blizzak winter tires on my Toyota RAV4 with a set of new Cooper Discoverer winter tires. The Coopers were considerably less expensive, and I rarely drove the RAV4 in conditions bad enough to warrant the extra security of the Blizzaks.
The decision made sense and I was happy until I attended a Toyota media event, in which I drove on a closed course covered with ice and snow in a new RAV4 fitted with Blizzak tires. Immediately after, I drove my 2009 RAV4 with the Coopers on the same course, and my stopping distance was a full car length greater at 40 kilometres an hour. That’s the difference between hitting and not hitting something, or someone, on the road.
This season, after writing about driving in snow with Nokian all-weather tires, I was offered a set of Sailun winter tires to try out on my car. I was unsure – Sailun is a Chinese budget brand, and I was planning to move back up to what’s known as a “Tier One” brand, which would include Bridgestone Blizzaks or Michelin X-Ice. However, Sailun has a new performance winter tire, the Ice Blazer WSTX, and I agreed to give it a test.
There’s a lot of technology in a winter tire. Most important, the compound of the rubber is different, made from dozens of ingredients, including natural and synthetic rubber, silica, oil and carbon black, a sooty powder used to colour and strengthen tires. It’s designed to stay flexible at below-freezing temperatures.
Manufacturers speak of 7 degrees Celsius as the temperature to install winter tires, but that’s generally just the temperature at which most summer tires become too hard to grip the road effectively. As a rule of thumb, all-season tires begin to lose grip in single-digit temperatures, while all-weather tires lose effectiveness at about minus-10 degrees Celsius, with a final limit at about minus-25 degrees. True winter tires are good to about minus-40 or even colder.
Mark Richardson's 2009 Toyota RAV4 fitted with Sailun winter tires near Smith Falls, Ont.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
Everything is a balance, of course. If the compound is too soft, it will wear faster, and its added resistance to the road will increase fuel consumption.
The treads are quite different, too. Older tires were designed to have large blocks that chewed through snow, and they would be fitted at a couple of sizes narrower to bite deeper into the snow under the weight of the car. Newer tires, however, maintain the standard width in order to put more contact against ice, and their treads dissipate the thin film of water that melts beneath the tire as it rolls against the frozen ground. They have small slits, or sipes, to help the rubber spread and stick, and their chunky blocks don’t need to be so deep, so they provide a quieter ride.
Sailun invited me to a comparison test at Montreal’s iCar track, at the old Mirabel airport, and I drove up in my RAV4 to see how the new tires stacked up against Firestone’s new Winterforce 2 tire. There had been some heavy snow and the test track was bumpy and rutted. I didn’t notice any difference with braking distance, though steering seemed a little better with the Sailuns, and this may have been because the WSTX has a squarer profile than the Winterforce.
“I’ve always found that Blizzaks and X-Ice are always much better than the competition on really hard-pack and icy conditions – that’s where they shine,” said Wayne Cuculuzzi, vice-president of product management and development for Sailun Tire Americas. “But I’ve found most times that when you get into deeper snow, that’s where some of the other products, like our product, tend to work better.”
The WSTX is less expensive than the Blizzak or X-Ice: $191 each for my 17-inch size, compared with $217 and $231, respectively, while the Winterforce 2 lists for $201. There are often sales that bring those prices down.
The WSTX can have studs fitted to improve traction on ice still further, and as many as half the buyers choose this option in those parts of Canada that allow it. Studs are illegal in southern Ontario and in most of Canada during the summer because they can damage the asphalt. I went out on a drifting course in a Subaru Impreza STI fitted with studded Ice Blazers and the grip was impressive, though most of the studs had fallen out from hard use. Most studs usually last the entire winter, but these tires were being abused relentlessly.
“There are a lot of companies that have been doing this for a century that have much bigger overhead, much bigger marketing budgets, much bigger headcounts,” Cuculuzzi said. “[Tires] all cost relatively the same amount of money to build, but it’s all the soft costs. A Tier One that’s been around a hundred years has spent a huge amount of time, money, energy and resources on research and development, while brands that are only 20 or 30 years old have a lot of that learning that they didn’t have to do themselves. The curve is much shorter for the newer builders. I think some of the Tier Ones are pioneers and they tend to spearhead change and innovation.”
Or as somebody else, not with Sailun, said less charitably: “They’ve got to pay for the blimp somehow!”
Cuculuzzi said that Sailun has developed a way to melt the ingredients of a tire into a liquid before it is moulded, to better blend them together and form a more consistent and effective compound.
I don’t know about that, but I do know that I drove home, though Ottawa, into the thick of a storm that dropped 20 centimetres of snow on Southern Ontario. In Kingston, there was even “thundersnow.” The highways were mostly covered in snow and my RAV4 stuck to the ground as predictably as it would on a dirt road in summer.
Cars and trucks were in the ditches to each side as they’d slid out on the ice. Me? I drove slower and traction was never an issue. In a Canadian snowstorm, you can’t ask for more than that.
The writer was a guest of Sailun. Content was not subject to approval.
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