New tyre compound for Oulton Park
Dunlop, Official Tyre Partner to the MSA British Touring Car Championship, will be introducing a new specification tyre at the next rounds of the championship at Oulton Park this weekend.
The new ‘Dunlop Sport Maxx BTCC Medium’ tyre will replace the previous Medium specification tyre and is designed to have improved stability under braking and even greater consistency throughout a race distance. The Soft Option tyre will remain unchanged.
Michael Butler, Dunlop’s BTCC Manager, explained the change: “Even though we are the sole supplier, we are always looking to introduce new developments that can benefit the teams and the racing. The new tyre uses new materials that have been proven in our successful GT Endurance racing programmes and we decided that applying these new technologies would benefit the BTCC tyre.”
The new tyre was tested on a range of cars at Snetterton in 2014 and at the Brands Hatch and Donington pre-season test days.
Regarding the current ‘Dunlop Sport Maxx BTCC Soft’ tyre, Butler states that this will not change in 2015: “We did see a bigger than expected difference between the two tyres at the recent Donington race, but this was due to colder than expected track conditions. During the Summer months, we expect the performance difference between the current Soft and the new Medium to be similar to 2014. We will consider applying the same material changes to the 2016 Soft tyre if we find it is necessary after analysing the results from this season”
The Soft and Medium tyres will continue to be identified by white Dunlop letters (soft) and yellow and black Dunlop lettering (medium) on the sidewall.