Allen considers seven-time...
Allen considers seven-time AMA Superbike champion Mat Mladin one of the three best riders he's ever worked with when it came to testing tires.
And not long after that a rider who would transform U.S. roadracing arrived. Mat Mladin began an incomparable career with Yoshimura Suzuki in 1996. He switched to a Fast by Ferracci Ducati in 1997, winning four times on Michelins before moving back to Yoshimura for the remainder of his career. When he was done, he had seven titles and 82 race wins. Still, Allen believes he was underrated.
"To this day people don't know how much talent Mat Mladin had," Allen said after listing Mladin as one of the top three tire testers. "The number of guys that Mladin outqualified by a second on race tires when everybody else was using all of the qualifiers and Mat never looked at one the whole weekend long. And to this day they won't believe it, and it's absolutely true. And I'm not talking about once-I'm talking race after race all season long. Somebody got close, he'd put in a qualifier and then he'd be a second ahead of them again. So yeah, for sure, he'd just amaze us. You got a pretty good idea why he'd split in three laps, because he knew when everybody else was farting around with qualifying tires." Part of the credit goes to crew chief Pete Doyle, who led the team for most of Mladin's titles, and who Jim Allen believes is one of the few crew chiefs who really understands tires.
The one rider who impressed...
The one rider who impressed Allen the most when it came to testing tires was former AMA and World Superbike champion Doug Polen. Allen says Polen could recall a particular tire out of dozens tested months earlier.
The one rider who never won Daytona-but who Allen believes is the best tester ever-was Doug Polen. Polen came out of Texas to make his name in the late '80s by twice winning the 600 Supersport title, in '87 and '88, and the 750 Supersport title in '88. When he hooked up with Eraldo Ferracci in '91 on the Ducati 888, the combination was unbeatable. Polen won the World Superbike Championship in '91 and '92 and the AMA title in '93 on FBF Ducatis, while leading Dunlop's tire development.
Now, nearly 20 years on, Allen can't hide his admiration. "I mean, Polen was absolutely amazing; to this day probably the best I've ever worked with. When we were developing racing tires in Buffalo, Doug would try stuff in April or May and he would say in August, after having gone through, I don't know how many specs, 40-50 different tires, he would say, 'This one feels like that red one that we had in April. You remember, that red one we tried.' I'd have to go back and look at my notes, but he would remember. And he was always spot-on. When guys are good, when they have confidence, they can do that sort of stuff."
For Polen it's just a "basic understanding of what a tire does and what it's doing when the bike is going through the different motions around the track, whether it's in the middle of the corner or it's under acceleration on exit, whether it's on the brakes going in. And then the amount of centrifugal force you have, the radius of the tires, the load on the corner, the friction coefficient you have of the surface versus what tire you're running. So then I would basically take information and what I would feel it do on the racetrack and compare that."
Allen has been a fixture in...
Allen has been a fixture in the AMA paddock for decades. Here he's shown talking with former AMA and World Superbike champion Scott Russell during the rider's Muzzy Kawasaki days, circa 1992.
Of the two technical innovations in Allen's career, the first was the radial tire. The first time they were tried in AMA was at Sears Point in the late '80s, with Randy Renfrow riding. Renfrow was instantly and substantially quicker than on standard tires, and "he came in right away and said, 'When do we get a front?' Right away [he said] that it was better and never looked back from that time to now." The tire had "just way, way more grip right away. The stability was good. Change of direction, grip, just the whole thing. They didn't drop off as quickly."
If the radial was the biggest revolution, the N-Tech radial was the second biggest. "Just the way the tires are built-it's a different construction method, different theory, different materials, using the materials in a different way," Allen said of the tire that was first used in 2004. "Just building the tire in a different fashion. It's sort of an offshoot of what we call the JLB, jointless band in our street tires. They're similar to N-Techs. It's another little thing we do with the N-Techs we can't do with the street tires. It was just a lot stronger. Using the materials in a circumferential fashion in the tires basically constricts the growth, stops materials from stretching. And gave much better directional stability at the same time."