Over the years, the trophy cabinets of champions become packed with the different medals and cups they claim on their way to glory. As it bowed out of the WRC, BFGoodrich chose to mark the occasion by thanking the crews that brought it so many wins and titles with an original prize: personalised coloured tyres.
Marcus Grönholm and Timo Rautiainen (Ford) gave the BFGoodrich brand its first WRC success by winning the 2006 Monte Carlo Rally. In the space of two seasons, the Finnish pair totalled twelve outright victories on BFGoodrich tyres.
Meanwhile, Sébastien Loeb and Daniel Elena (Citroën/BFGoodrich) contributed the most to BFGoodrich's list of sixteen world class wins and two world titles.
During the recent Wales Rally GB, the final round of 2007 and the swan song WRC outing for the American tyre brand, BFGoodrich profited from the occasion to present these four drivers and co-drivers with an original and personalised award: tyres coloured with their respective national flags and marked '150 WRC rounds' for Grönholm and Rautiainen and '98 WRC rounds' for Loeb and Elena.
It should be stressed that these weren't tyres that had simply been painted but actually coloured in their mass using colorants incorporated into the compound itself. The production of these coloured tyres took approximately 300 hours of work.
The strips of coloured rubber were delicately laid on the casing of a real rally tyre; alongside each other for the 'Finnish' tyres and superimposed in the case of the 'French' and 'Monegasque' tyres.
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