"Cordiant" to present a historical exposition at VDNKh

As part of the "Prodvizhenie" car festival at VDNH in Moscow, the "Cordiant" holding will present an exhibition dedicated to the history of the tire industry, which will include rare exhibits from the museum of the Yaroslavl tire plant. The exposition will consist of several thematic zones dedicated to various events important for the enterprise and the entire domestic tire industry.

The Yaroslavl tire plant is the oldest tire enterprise in Russia, which was built in 1932 according to the project of the American company Seiberling, and at the exhibition you can see a film about the creation of the Yaroslavl rubber-asbestos plant (YARAK), which included the plant until 1941. There will also be a photo of a two-story trolleybus - they appeared on the streets of Moscow in 1938, structurally repeated British analogs and were equipped with Yaroslavl-made tires. The main exhibit of this zone will be clocks with a "tire" design, created for the participants of the XVII Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in 1934.

In the next zone, attention will be paid to the work of the plant during the Great Patriotic War, when tires were produced in the country only in Yaroslavl. There will be shown photographs of the war years, as well as a tire for the most massive truck of the WWII era - ZIS-5.

Another exhibit is an aviation tire from 1942 for the I-16 fighters, which was recently found near Tver. Experts note the uniqueness of the find, as similar items are rarely preserved in such good condition, and the marking "Y" on the sidewall indicates that the tire was made in Yaroslavl. According to archival data, temporary airfields of the Soviet aviation were located near the place where the tire was found, and it was probably used on one of the planes. What is symbolic is that such a plane could have been piloted by the first Heroes of the Soviet Union, including Mikhail Zhukov, a worker at the Yaroslavl tire plant.

In the "Path of Progress" zone, you can learn about the development of the plant, which was a pioneer and then a flagship of the tire industry, supplying products including for export. The Yaroslavl tire plant was the first tire enterprise in Europe and the fourth in the world in terms of capacity, and in 1950 it was the first in the USSR to establish the production of tubeless tires for "Pobeda", "Volga" and ZIM cars. In the 1960s, the plant also became the first in the country to produce tires for the new "Zhiguli" passenger car, and in the 1990s it was the first to master the production of truck tires with a full metal cord structure.

In the innovation zone, you can also watch a film about the famous car rally "Moscow-Karakumy-Moscow" in 1933, which was held to test Soviet cars and tires made using synthetic rubber - the technology for obtaining this raw material for the tire industry was also developed at the Yaroslavl tire plant. In May 1933, the technologists of the central factory laboratory first added synthetic rubber to rubber mixes for tires, which marked the beginning of a new era in the global tire industry.

Another revolution was the development of new tire designs with radial cord arrangement in the carcass ("R") and a removable tread ("RS"). Tires with a radial structure had a mileage of up to 70-80 thousand kilometers, which is twice as much, and while the experience and equipment of Italian specialists were used for the production of "R" tires, the production of "RS" tires had to be started from scratch. Designers proceeded from the fact that the tread is the first to become unusable, after which the tire has to be thrown away. At the same time, the "RS" tire had a removable tread that could be replaced with a new one, and it could be used further. Moreover, it was possible to choose a tread of the desired type for both asphalt and off-road, and the first "RS" tire was launched into mass production in 1960.

In the mid-1980s, the Yaroslavl tire plant also produced tires made of polyurethane foam, developed by the Research Institute of the Tire Industry of the USSR. It was expected that the development would reduce the cost of tire production, but it did not find wide application, and production was stopped.

The exposition will also tell about the outstanding personalities whose fate was connected with the Yaroslavl plant, which, for example, was the first place of work of Valentina Tereshkova. In 1954, she started working in the assembly shop as a bracelet maker, and just eight years later she piloted the Vostok-6 spacecraft, becoming the first woman cosmonaut in the world.

In 1972-1973, the filming of the film "The Big Change" took place in Yaroslavl, which also became an event for the enterprise. When Nester Petrovich, played by Mikhail Kononov, became the class leader of "9A", he had to catch truants at several Yaroslavl enterprises, and he visited the vulcanization shop of the tire plant to see the class leader, Ivan Fedoskin.

In 1982, the 200 millionth tire was produced at the Yaroslavl tire plant, and later its assembler received the title of Hero of Socialist Labor. The exposition will also feature materials about the participation of "Cordiant" in the "Days of Speed on the Ice of Baikal" festival and other records of more recent times.

And, of course, there will be tires that the Yaroslavl tire plant produces today, and at VDNH, the flagship model Cordiant Gravity for passenger cars will be presented, which was developed specifically for Russian conditions. The manufacturer claims that the tire has an increased tread depth, which, in combination with an optimized profile, extends the service life by an average of one season (Long-Cor technology), and also provides reliable traction on wet surfaces and effectively resists aquaplaning.

The "Prodvizhenie" festival will take place on August 2-3.

Photo: "Cordiant"