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"         Hankook Ventus Sport K104   Hankook (pronounced han-cook) may strike you as a funny, unfamiliar name for a tire company, but it&amp;#039;s actually the first and oldest Korean tiremaker (founded in 1941 as the Chosun Tire Industrial Company). And this year it will sell an estimated $1.6 billion in passenger car, truck and bus tires worldwide. Already a fixture in the European and Asian original-equipment markets, Hankook has its sights set on the U.S., already supplying , and GM-Daewoo and most recently landing an especially big fish, the . Which, in case you hadn&amp;#039;t noticed, is the best-selling vehicle in North America.   Talk about your prize largemouth bass. After the whole blowout/roll-over flap with the , Ford&amp;#039;s criteria for accepting a tire must be especially stringent. And with the Blue Oval&amp;#039;s notorious squeezing of suppliers to reduce costs, the Hankooks surely must deliver durable, safe performance at a pretty reasonable cost.   But lest we bore you with truck tires, let&amp;#039;s wake up and smell the silica compound with Hankook&amp;#039;s ultra-high-performance street tire, the Ventus Sport K104. Its tread is directional, with angled channels for water evacuation, yet it has firm, large outer tread blocks for cornering stability and an unbroken center rib that&amp;#039;s framed by twin circumferential channels. It&amp;#039;s Y-rated for speed and has a tread-wear rating of 280. Impressively, it&amp;#039;s offered in no fewer than 47 sizes, ranging in profile from 30 to 55 series, and in diameters from 15 to 20 in.   Our experience with these tires was somewhat limited \u2014 two laps around an autocross course set up on the infield of Las Vegas Motor Speedway, fitted to an automatic-transmission, V-6 Mustang \u2014 but in grip, turn-in crispness, at-the-limit noise and feel, they compared favorably to an identical shod with Yokohama AVS ES100 tires of the same size. If anything, the Yokohamas seemed to allow a little more drop-throttle rotation in the turns, but the difference felt so slight that it could be chalked up to car-to-car variation. A few more back-to-back laps would have been helpful, to see which tire lost more grip due to heat buildup, etc.   The next time your car&amp;#039;s high-performance shoes are down to the wear bars, here&amp;#039;s another tire that&amp;#039;s worth adding to your shopping list, from a company you&amp;#039;re bound to hear more about. \u2014 Douglas Kott   Toyo Proxes 4   It seems as if everyone is trying to build an all-season tire that can perform with the best summer tires, on the summer tire&amp;#039;s turf \u2014 hot, dry conditions. The Michelin Pilot Sport A/S, Pirelli P7000 SuperSport and BFGoodrich g-Force T/A KDWS are but three to tackle this high-performance all-season market. And now Toyo has added one more, the Proxes 4.   What&amp;#039;s the mark of a great high-performance all-season tire? It&amp;#039;s a tire that can hang with a full-on performance tire in dry conditions up your favorite mountain road, while providing better-than-summer tires rain capabilities and can also be driven, in a pinch, in snow. Toyo says the Proxes 4 provides all this combined with no compromise in tread life.   How is this done? Through engineering and chemistry. Dry performance is achieved with a curving center rib, which, although it might not seem logical, Toyo insists actually &amp;quot;stabilizes and enhances directional control.&amp;quot; This is combined with paired shoulder blocks that provide a more stable structure and result in less tread block deformation, according to Toyo. Wet performance is achieved with the use of a W-shaped tread pattern that is intended to evacuate water from beneath the footprint of the tire.   Through Toyo&amp;#039;s latest reinforced tread compounding technology, and despite that it uses the same tread compound as its ultra-high-performance brother \u2014 the T1-S \u2014 the Proxes 4 has a tread wear rating of 300 (excellent for a high-grip tire), a traction rating of AA (the highest rating) and a temperature rating of A (also the highest possible). Expect it to last about twice as long as the T1-S, and cost about 25 percent less.   During racetrack driving impressions two things became quite clear: a) the Proxes 4 has incredible dry-weather performance for an all-season tire and b) it can withstand significant abuse without feathering and chunking. It also gives very good feedback as it starts to give up grip, and is easy to control as you slide the tires around. It felt far more like a summer tire \u2014 and a really good one at that \u2014 than it did an all-season.   Toyo is aiming the Proxes 4 at the enthusiast tuner market \u2014 think The Fast and The Furious rather than Grand Prix. Therefore the targeted fitments include the Acura RSX and TSX, Dodge SRT-4, and , but also the and and , on wheels from 15 in. up to 20 in. Which is also why the Proxes 4, with its unidirectional W-shaped tread design, looks so dang good. Because in the market Toyo is aiming at, the appearance of performance is almost more important than the realization. \u2014 Mike Monticello "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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