A Little Orange Makes Black Yokohama Tires More Green

According to the folks at Yokahama Tire’s racing division, normal racing tires contain little or no natural materials. Presumably, many of those materials—especially for high-end series—are things ordinarily associated with NASA or just deep-space exploration in general, possibly on craft not created by man.

Anyway, the folks at Yokohama introduced a tire last year at the 12 Hours of Sebring Race that contained 15% natural materials. This year they’ve bettered the ENV-R1 tire with the ENV-R2, which is 20% natural, using both orange oil—yes, that’s as in oranges—and natural rubber.

The orange oil-natural rubber combination—combined via proprietary technology—is called “Super Nano-Power Rubber.” Of course.

The ENV-R2 tires are the official spec tire of the Patrón GT3 Challenge by Yokohama and the ALMS GT3 Challenge (GTC) Class races.

What’s more, Super-Nano Power Rubber is also used in the company’s dB Super E-spec passenger tires.

Mark Chung, Yokahama director, corporate strategy and planning, said of the use of the ENV-R2 tires, “All the Porsche 911 GT3 cars in the two sports car series will be competing on tires that are superior to regular racing compounds… and they are Earth-friendly. That’s what I call eco-racing.”

Given that driving around on a track for 12 hours at high speeds and ending up—ideally—at the place you started probably isn’t the most environmentally friendly thing you can do, every little bit helps.