The now annual gathering of the Dunlop shod clans with a pre-season test for customers concluded yesterday after four days on on-track action at Motorland Aragon.
20 teams from the FIA World Endurance Championship, European Le Mans Series (ELMS) and German championships took part in a test busier than most participants can recall in recent years.
Varied weather conditions might be unwelcome for most visitors to Spain but for the teams looking to prepare for the season ahead it was ideal for the purpose!
The move to Dunlop tyres for both privateer LMP1 teams from the FIA WEC saw Rebellion and ByKolles field one car each at the test with Oliver Webb getting his first laps in the CLM LMP1 car (below) and both teams getting a chance to observe each others progress for the first time since the Dunlop test after last season’s Bahrain WEC finale.
There was an impressive turn-out of LMP2s with 13 cars across the four days from G-Drive Racing bringing their now very orange ELMS entered Gibson, Signatech Alpine and Baxi DC Racing both had their Alpine 460 Badged Orecas, Thiriet by TDS Racing brought their Oreca too.
AF Racing attended with a pair of BR01s, Extreme Speed Motorsports brought both of their Nissan engined Ligiers, RGR Sport by Morand were there with a Ligier too, as was Greaves Motorsport who also brought along their Gibson (with Chris Hoy getting more seat time in an LMP2) with Strakka’s Gibson running too.
Memo Rojas got his first running in the New Greaves Ligier.
On the GT front Aston Martin Racing’s new technical partnership with Dunlop was reflected with one of the V8 Vantage GTEs bound for the WEC in attendance for the battles with Michelin to come and the single tyre ELMS dataset was rounded out nicely with attendance from both Porsche and Ferrari customers to add from the data gathered from the Beechdean Aston Martin at Bahrain.
From the teams set to do battle on the Nordschleife Phoenix Racing’s Audi, the Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus SCG003 (above) and the Walkenhorst BMW also tested, along with a pair of teams from the DMV GTC championship.
Mike McGregor, Dunlop Manager Testing & Track Support, Race Design & Development: “I firstly need to thank the teams for coming to our test. We invited our customers to take part in the four days of testing to help us all. We get to record a huge amount of data that helps us ahead of the respective championship seasons and the teams get dedicated time to working on the set-ups to optimise the chassis/tyre combinations.
“We’ve had very positive feedback. In particular the one-brand tyres are more consistent and generally better in performance. Our new LMP1 teams possibly had the biggest job as it’s a completely new tyre so we’ve now got much more data to analyse to help with the next steps. We have also made a big step with our LMP2 tyres so the teams have been working on how to get the best performance and there is potential for a lot more improvement. It’s rare to be able to test wet, intermediate and all three slick compounds in one test so it was excellent from that point of view.”
