ADVAN is a brand that has evolved and grown through motorsports. For this reason, we believe that, in order to pass on the baton to the next era, we cannot justify ignoring various environmental issues simply by saying, "because it is motor sports," or "because it is for sports performance." In other words, in order for many people to continue enjoying motorsports in the future, it is important for us to face up to these issues, even in the most difficult of fields...

Until now, motorsports has been called the test laboratory of driving, because of the history of technologies evolving through the proving of "speed." Now, though, the new and unprecedented requirement of "environmental friendliness" has been added. We cannot create a sustainable future for motorsports without an awareness of environmental consideration.

One initiative aimed at achieving this is the development of tires using sustainable and recycled materials in a new project—SF NEXT50— launched by JRP (Japan Race Promotion) in 2022, in an effort to revitalize Super Formula. However, it was not simply okay to make a tire that is more environmentally friendly. There was an added condition. We must do so without sacrificing grip or wear resistance whatsoever.

Despite having such a high obstacle to overcome, our development team was undeterred, and worked to develop environmentally friendly motorsports tires by replacing petroleum-derived materials with naturally derived materials while determining the compound ratio, utilizing naturally derived compounding agents produced from oil palm fruits and orange peel in addition to natural rubber, and using recycled rubber recovered from waste tires and mass-balanced synthetic rubber.

People tend to believe that adding environmentally friendly elements leads to a reduction in tire performance, but these tires prove that environmentally friendly tires are better as long as they don't sacrifice performance. In actual testing, the response was good, with drivers saying that "performance in racing is not particularly different."

We are also working to develop other kinds of environmentally friendly motorsport tires, and the tires we supplied to the overall winner of the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb in 2022 make use of biomass-derived butadiene rubber. (ADVAN A052)

ADVAN motorsports tires—including those for Super Formula and Pikes Peak—will be produced at YOKOHAMA's Mishima Plant. All of the electricity used in this production line, dedicated to motorsports tires, has been switched to electricity derived from 100% renewable energy as of January 2022. Yes, efforts to achieve carbon-neutral production of motorsports tires are also now underway.

YOKOHAMA aims to reduce CO2 emissions by 38% compared to 2013 by 2030, and 100% by 2050. On the other hand, our targets for sustainable materials development are to increase the use of renewable/recycled materials to 27% by 2025, at least 30% by 2030, and achieve 100% sustainable raw materials by 2050; and the first move toward these targets has been made with ADVAN. Incidentally, the name ADVAN is a coined word derived from the English word "advance." Considering these efforts, it seems fair to say that it is also true a pioneer, "advancing" ahead of the times.

Check out the eight high performance tires available in the ADVAN line.