While not yet a household name like Goodyear, Michelin, or Bridgestone, the name "Hankook" is quickly becoming recognized in many specialized circles. Over the recent years, Hankook has has aggressively move in to the competition market, and gained the attention of other markets. One of those markets has been winter tires.

Over the past couple of years, I have received many questions about the Hankook iPike w409 snow tires. For a short time this fall, one of the biggest sources of traffic to the Snow Tire FAQ was from people looking for information on Hankook snow tires! So, with this in mind, I set about making sure that the 2009 Real World Snow Tire Tests included a set of Hankook snow tires.

Things don't always work out quite as planned. As you can read in other posts, the combination of a down turning economy and increased demand for snow tires in Canada meant that the supply of tires for Press use all but dried up. Being a little, tiny, microscopic, one-cell organism next to the giants of the print media, that meant that the Snow Tire FAQ didn't get any tires donated for testing. (Bridgestone did provide an very interesting opportunity, which is partly described in "Teaser - Bridgestone Winter Driving School" and a series of post to follow.)

Being unable to get a set of iPike w409 snow tires donated from Hankook, I gave up on them. Then, an opportunity presented itself through a Ham Radio contact. Paul at Kost Tire in Greece, NY was able to help with offsetting the cost of a set of iPike snow tires, so I took a leap of faith and The Snow Tire FAQ bought a set.

So, how have they been?

First off, the iPike w409 is designed to be a studded snow tire. I chose to get a set that did not have studs, so performance on ice was needs to be considered accordingly.

My first impression of them was that they were way better in the cold then the Ultra High Performance All Season tires (how's that for an oxymoron?) I had on the car before. If you have looked at a chart comparing typical traction vs. temperature for Snow, all Season, and Summer tires, this should not be much of a surprise.

Snow traction on all but packed snow has been excellent. If there is enough snow for the tires to get a grip in, they work very well. I was able to easily maintain the aggressive speeds of the fast speed group in the local Winter Rallies even though I was running a RWD car and the competition was (for the most part) running AWD cars.

Dirt & gravel road traction, another concern in winter rallying, was also very high. The tires worked very well, and I am currently planning on running them on gravel events in the summer.

I've been avoiding something. Have you noticed. It's ice traction. Honestly, without studs, the Hankook iPike w409 does not work that well on ice. On one of the winter events, we came to a road that had glare ice in several of the corners. The iPike w409 tires were scary. I could make not throttle or steering input without causing huge amounts of slip.

But, isn't that to be expected when running unstudded snow tires on ice, especially if they are designed for studs? Yes and no. Perhaps I am have been spoiled, but I have found the ice performance of 3 year old Nokian Hakka-4 tires which have had the studs extracted to be better than the 1/2 season iPike w409s.

So, where does that leave us?

The Hankook iPike w409 snow tires are great tires in the snow, and on dirt. Dry pavement traction is not compromised much beyond that of a typical snow tire. Road noise is quite acceptable. The one caveat is that these tires seem to rely primarily on their studs for ice traction. This means that if you are planning on facing ice, you really should consider purchasing the studded version of the tire.

- John