Michelin produce some very good tyres and I am very lucky to have spent some time testing a rather good example of their rubber in Morocco.

This came about on the back of some tyre testing in England for a new dual purpose off road tyre called “Latitude Cross”. I say “on the back of” but actually it was “on the front of”. This was because we were going to be in Morocco before the event to launch the tyre in England and Michelin’s Steve Dalby suggested that I equip the green Impala Range Rover with a new set so that we could test them in The Sahara itself. This would give me some important “real life” experience for my briefings on the tyre at its launch back in England.

This tyre was designed to be a reasonably good off road tyre with very good road manners. We threw them at sand, had them scrabbling on stones, immersed in rivers and pounded along fast tracks in The High Atlas and The Sahara, but not before we had travelled 2000 odd miles on roads across Spain and Morocco. The Latitude Cross came through with flying colours proving that they were a tyre that would work not only in the sands of the Sahara but also on the mud and rock in the mountains as well as on Le Plage along the Atlantic coast.

Interestingly enough the tyres are now seeing sterling service on the Impala Discovery and they are in their fourth year, still with four millimetres of rubber to use – amazing.