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Sunday Musings – Tyres, tyres, tyres Part 3

GY-QS-Tyre-01

This is a follow up piece of my tyre review articles. Do check out my earlier articles to get a better context of the story.

I have now travelled around close to 10,000km on these set of tyres. Honestly, I still love it. I drove it up and down Genting a couple more times, travelled to Malacca and back and the thread still shows plenty of use left in them. The raining season has started and so far the tyres have given me a lot more confidence when travelling in the rain.

Just about 3 weeks back, a couple of friends decided to have coffee at the new Starbucks at Goh Tong on a cool Friday night. We all met up at the BHP station just after the Karak toll. I arrived there a little earlier than the rest and bumped into a large group of college kids in Myvis and other cars hanging out there.

The moment me and my friend left BHP heading up towards Genting, we took a rather pleasant yet exciting pace on the Karak roads and then slowly making the turn up towards Genting. Now the exciting bit for me normally comes after the guard house, where the two speed bumps are. Because it was also a long weekend, the problem I faced was that there was a fair bit of traffic heading up the same direction as well. I guess people wanted to try their luck at the slot machines.

As we made our way up, my friend in the Scirocco R was opening up the way for me until we hit the 3rd corner. We suddenly saw a Myvi and an E90 320i racing up. How I knew they were racing, they were driving recklessly. My definition of reckless is very simple, you are putting the lives of other drivers on the road at danger.

The guy in the 320i was trying to show off, I could see that the driver wound down his windows and I can literally hear his friends in the car cheering him on. He tried to overtake several cars but failed. Now, when you are on a two lane road going uphill and there are two cars in the lane, you just don’t try to squeeze in the middle to force the car in the left lane to brake and slow down. And this was exactly what the young kid did.

He had 3 near misses and one of them almost hitting my friend in the Scirocco R. If you are wondering how can a 320i keep up with the Scirocco R, that is because I mentioned, traffic was heavy, there were plenty of cars and busses hence the speed heading up was kept at a minimum.

But the moment my friend had a clear opening and road, he left us all smelling his smoke. And by us, I meant the crazy kids in the Myvi and 320i as well as me. Yup, I stayed behind to keep a little distance between my car and theirs as they continue to race each other and push other drivers off the road. Heck I even saw the Myvi understeering so badly that it was on 3 wheels as he tried to keep up with the 320i.

How does this relate to tyres you might be thinking now? Well, honestly, following behind them made me realise a couple of things. One, I had so much more grip compared to them. And two, the grip made all the difference because they made rookie mistakes such as attacking a corner too fast and then using the full width of the road at the exit, allowing me to get in the inner lane and have a faster exit speed. This definitely to easily overtake them and keep a good distance away from them.

So yes, it was an interesting drive up but I really have to say the tyres made a fair bit of difference.

  • Read Part 0 of my tyre review series
  • Read Part 1 of my tyre review series
  • Read Part 2 of my tyre review series

*This is the personal opinion of the writer and does not necessarily represent the views of Autofreaks.com