The Hankook Ventus R-S2 Z212 is the company’s first real stab at the Street Touring market. The earlier Ventus Sport K104 was a decent tire, but it failed to set the world on fire. Hankook didn’t waste much time in producing something new.
Hankook’s engineers and product planners have been listening, and returned with a rock-solid performance tire that blends on-track performance and street usability into an inexpensive package. They freely admit that they compete heavily against fellow Korean tire giant Kumho, and it’s pretty obvious that the Hankook engineers had their sights set on the Kumho ECSTA MX when designing the Ventus R-S2 Z212.
The Ventus R-S2 Z212 was the third tire that we tested and it finished up in a solid mid-pack fourth place, a few tenths behind the Yokohama Advan Neova and slightly ahead of the Kumho ECSTA MX.
The Hankook was designed primarily as a high-performance street tire, not a track tire, and as such the tread design and performance characteristics play that out. The tire has a good initial steering response, but it’s not linear. We felt that the tire was quick to turn in with the first few degrees of steering input, but things quickly became mushy as large steering inputs were needed to get through the tighter transitions. “Even with the non-linearity of steering inputs, the transition grip was very good, making it easy to place the car in slaloms,” said Chris Harvey.
We were surprised to find that the Hankook had the worst grip during acceleration and braking.
Like its lateral (or side-to-side) grip, the longitudinal traction was hampered by the large amounts of void area and consequently precious little tread touching the track surface. This led to quite a bit of chatter from the ABS system during braking and even some wheelspin from this LSD-equipped Nissan Sentra SE-R Spec V. Even at the shaved depth of 4/32 inch, the Hankook still looked like a rain-capable street tire when compared to the other fast players.
The Hankook didn’t give the best feedback during steady-state cornering, and the tire quickly lost grip as it was pushed over the edge of adhesion. This made cornering on the skidpad
a little dicey—and the times suffered.
Accelerating out of the skid pad was where the longitudinal grip, or lack thereof, really hurt the tire, as this pushed the car wide. As a result, speed down the following straight suffered. This was only made worse when the Hankook overheated near the end of each run, requiring considerable cooling between stints.
Both drivers came to the final conclusion that the Hankook Ventus R-S2 Z212 was a great carcass in search of a different tread design, one with less void area for more dry grip. The Hankook exhibited some wear during the testing, and it’s pretty clear that their engineers were certainly going with a softer compound. Our recommendation? Please give us more of that tread compound by reducing the void area. Hankook will be offering contingency money for top finishers at SCCA National Tours, ProSolos and the national championships.
