20 Dunlop teams from the FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC), European Le Mans Series (ELMS) and German championships have taken part in a comprehensive four-day test at the Aragon circuit in northern Spain. The weather proved variable enough for the teams to successfully test the full 2016 specification range.
Rebellion and ByKolles fielded one car each, both teams working with the Dunlop engineers on set-up to begin optimising the move onto Dunlop’s new LMP1 tyres.
In LMP2, 13 cars were present from G-Drive Racing, Signatech Alpine, AF Racing, Extreme Speed Motorsports, RGR Sport by Morand, Baxi DC Racing Alpine, Strakka Racing, Thiriet by TDS Racing and Greaves Motorsport. At least two cars for each manufacturer running on Dunlop tyres in 2016 were present, the five different marques being Ligier, Oreca, BR, Alpine and Gibson.
Aston Martin spent time working on set-up to adjust to new tyres following the announcement of switching to Dunlop last month. The car was testing for Aston Martin’s WEC campaign where the GT category features open tyre competition. Porsche and Ferrari rivals from the ELMS GT field also took part and, following the Beechdean Aston Martin tyre test last year, Dunlop has data for all three manufacturers’ models competing in the one-brand category.
Three teams from the VLN, the newly announed Phoenix Racing Audi, the Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus SCG003 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.