TyreCheck Joins Forces With BRAKE Road Safety Week

Last year saw the inaugural TyreCheck safety campaign, organised by the National Tyre Distributors Association. The event is to be repeated this year and, to add extra impact, the NTDA has joined forces with road safety lobby group BRAKE and TyreCheck 2001 will run alongside the BRAKE Road Safety Week, which takes place from 31st March to 6th April. Among other events, the week will see the launch of a national initiative to encourage drivers to put safety first.

TyreCheck 2001 is open to all tyre retailers in the UK and involves checking the condition of tyres on vehicles brought into tyre outlets during the safety week. If last year’s results are anything to go by, there is ample scope for improved safety; 37,500 tyres were examined during the 2000 campaign, and 10 per cent were below the minimum legal tread depth of 1.6mm while a further 17 per cent had tread of 2mm or less.

26 per cent were damaged in some way and 46 per cent were incorrectly inflated. The 2001 event is once again being funded by most of the major tyre manufacturers and organised by the NTDA. Depot merchandising packs containing leaflets, posters and record sheets for the tyre inspections will be made available free of charge, to those companies wishing to get involved in the campaign.

There will also be a number of local editorial and advertising features appearing during the week, which retailers can support – last year, the total readership of press stories was estimated at over 20,000,000. A dedicated website at www.tyrecheck2001.

com will contain free-to-download information, logos and pictures and will be up and running by the end of February. NTDA Director Richard Edy said that the 2000 TyreCheck campaign captured the interest and involvement of many retailers and the association is confident that this year’s event will be even more successful and will benefit from linking up with BRAKE’s Road Safety Week. He went on: “It also means that TyreCheck continues to develop as a campaign which offers all tyre retailers the opportunity to promote their business expertise in a responsible and effective fashion.

” On the opening day of the week (Saturday 31st March, there will be road shows in major city shopping centres, including Leeds, Cardiff, Norwich, Kingston, Belfast and Liverpool. Tyre retailers will be invited to support these by providing staff and resources to mount safety demonstrations. The year 2000 results show that there could be as many as 13 million illegal tyres on UK roads and TyreCheck 2001 gives retailers the chance to help improve driver awareness and road safety while at the same time attracting extra business, which cannot be bad.