DUNLOP’S highly anticipated softer compound wet weather tyre developed for the Gen3 Supercars endured a baptism of fire on debut at Albert Park.
The Japanese company has produced a softer wet to suit the new lighter and lower downforce Ford Mustang and Chevrolet Camaro.
A test run at Sandown in August showed the tyres provide improved grip in full wet conditions, addressing a long-held gripe that the previous wet rubber was insufficient.
It’s hoped that trait will ensure Supercars can race in heavily wet conditions that would have previously resulted in competition being stopped or abandoned.
However, the first run in anger for the new tyres came on a drying track at the start of Saturday morning’s first 15-minute qualifying session at Albert Park.
The tyres quickly began to overheat and blister, forcing drivers to make a far earlier move to the hard compound slicks than they would have previously.
Former driver and team owner turned television pundit Mark Larkham immediately flagged the situation as a concern.
“They’ve generated an enormous amount of temperature, the blistering is obvious, but there’s an enormous amount of wear,” said Larkham of the tyres on the broadcast.
“That’s the reason that drivers love these things in the wet (the increased temperature), but I tell you what, as we go into our year, I’m a little bit concerned we’re not going to be able to run these tyres in wet-drying conditions.
“That’s not a bad thing, it’s just going to back teams into some really difficult strategy situations where we’re going to see going forwards teams doing exactly that, having to go out on hard, slick tyres in wet/drying conditions.
“I’m not so sure, we might need to have a bit of a revisit of that.”
Dunlop motorsport manager Kevin Fitzsimons noted the combination of the conditions and the circuit made for the worst possible situation in which to debut the tyres.
“Us as a company as well as all the teams are still learning the cars and you couldn’t have had a worse situation than that (for the tyre),” Fitzsimons told V8 Sleuth.
“It was a very short qualifying, so no time to ease into it and learn what the tyre is doing, engineers are still working out what base pressure works for them, every car had a dry setup on it still, so it had significant camber for qualifying, more than they’d race with.
“The track was drying, it’s a high speed, high load track, every box you could put down had a cross next to it.
“It’s not ideal but now everyone has learnt, and we’ve got guys saying that if we had our time over again we’d do this, this and this. We’re learning.”
Fitzsimons says Dunlop is open to changing the make-up of the wet tyre, but says more learning needs to be done before that is seriously considered.
“The previous wet would have been diabolical on this car with the weight difference and no aero,” he noted.
“We’ve got 2200 of these wets produced already, we just need to get some more running and more info.
“If there needs to be an adjustment we’ll look at it. I’ve spoken with Adrian (Burgess, Head of Motorsport) and co at Supercars and at the moment they’re quite happy with the way things are.
“Heat is the issue, they’ve definitely blistered, we’ll keep learning and working with the teams and go from there.”
Triple Eight team manager Mark Dutton says the way the tyres blistered was not totally unexpected but agreed it’ll change the way teams tackle such conditions.
“When you have a wet tyre that is an all-rounder, it’s more of an intermediate and you can just run until it runs out of tread almost,” he said, referring to the previous wet.
“That gave you a lot of margin in races, on a drying track you could keep going, keep going, until it was perfectly safe or the ideal time to swap.
“It’ll definitely change the way you run things. Even with race cambers on you will most likely have to change over quicker when you’re going from wets to slicks.
“We never saw any of this blistering on the old wet ever, so it’s big learning.”
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