YOKOHOMA G012 GEOLANDAR A/T-S `6,200 per tyre

Yokohama India dealerships

Last month I rallied a Gypsy for the first time in my life, on the Maruti Suzuki Desert Storm, and as you might have read in that story the only thing to work flawlessly throughout the six day event were the Yokohama tyres. Prior to the rally I wasn't sure what tyres to run, whether to go for the full rally-spec Advans or stick to the all-terrain Geolanders. I've had very good experiences with the Geolander tyres that ran on my Outlander a few years ago and Aniruddha, my co-driver, also advised me to stick with these tyres as they're better suited to the sand dunes than specialist rally tyres that can generate too much grip and hence bog the Gypsy down.

We ran the LT (Light Truck) spec of the 215/75 15-inch G012 Geolandar A/T-S tyres on our Gypsy, the stronger sidewalls allowing us to run very low tyre pressures on the sand stages without worrying about punctures. For six days on the rally while things kept breaking apart on our Gypsy, the one thing that gave us no problems were the Yokos. The only thing we did was check tyre pressures, lower it to 20PSI for the stages and that's about it.

These tyres are also perfect for the capabilities of the Gypsy. The tyres generate enough grip on sand and also some of the gravel patches. I could push the Gypsy safely to the limits, there were no unprovoked tail-out moments. And on the many, many bumps that we hit at some crazy speeds the tyres didn't get damaged. The only time we got bogged down in the sand was when our engine was 20bhp down on power. Once the engine was sorted we never came close to getting stuck in the sand and on the last stage we set the second fastest stage time, overall, which was also thanks to the performance of the tyres.

We asked for 8 tyres for the rally which turned out to be too many. We only used the four that the Gypsy ran on and even those have so much life left in them that we've kept it in our Delhi office to slap on to the next Gypsy we are buying for other rally raid events.