Tommy Hayden won a Superstock race on a 17-inch N-Tech at Elkhart Lake in June of 2004. The 16.5-inch superbike tire first turned up on the allocation sheets at Road Atlanta, near the end of the year. Allen remembers Mladin using one for the Friday morning practice "and you know what he's like when he's on the bike, when he's doing his practice and stuff. He talks to Pete Doyle and that's it. If you're the tire guy, you stand there and you talk to Pete. Mat doesn't have time. That's not the way he functions. He came in the pits and he wouldn't shut up. He was talking to everybody. He couldn't say enough about the tire and stuff." Mladin took pole by nearly 0.6 seconds and won both races.
All the racers past and present...
All the racers past and present know how much of their success is due to Allen's hard work over the years, and are quick to thank him in victory circle.
Tire testing is all about...
Tire testing is all about data, data, and more data. Here Allen debriefs Honda's Miguel Duhamel at the annual Daytona tire test in '95.
Racers have always found it...
Racers have always found it easy to talk to Allen, since he was a racer himself. Here Yamaha's Josh Hayes chats with Allen just after one of his victories at Mid-Ohio.
More impressive than the performance was the integrity-the tires held together. The year before, Mladin had a frightening rear tire failure on the Road Atlanta back straight. Dunlop also had a number of well-publicized failures at Daytona that year. "You remember those days. They were really dark days for us before the N-Tech," Allen recalls. Ben Spies had a spectacular tire failure at over 185 mph and, at an extraordinary follow-up test a few months later, Jason DiSalvo also had a failure. Allen takes the failures as personally as the triumphs. He admits Dunlop has had problems at Daytona, but for a good reason. "I've said this before, when you have 90 percent of the grid, which we had, you're going to have 90 percent of the problems. You've going to have 90 percent of the low speed crashes and you're going to have 90 percent of the high speed crashes, whether they're tire problems or not. So yeah, whatever light you want to look at the evidence you can make your own."
Dunlop Motorcycle Tyre UK's...
Dunlop Motorcycle Tyre UK's Dave Watkins (left) was the development manager for the factory, working closely with Allen for many years. Watkins will also be retiring after 46 years with Dunlop.
The evidence of a tire failure is a "bag of string and you're looking at it trying to figure out why it happened. Nothing ever goes to Daytona without passing the most rigorous wheel tests we can imagine. And those tires were passing all those wheel tests but they were failing on the track. Why? It makes you think that the wheel test isn't stringent enough, but what could you do? I mean, let's say the bikes go 200 mph. Now you're testing at 300 mph. The bikes weigh this much; OK, so with the G-forces and stuff they weigh two or three times that. So, OK, let's not go two or three times the weight, let's go five times the weight. They pass the test. You go to Daytona, they fail. Something's going on. That's about the time we came in with the N-Tech tires. Basically when we first came with N-Tech we couldn't make them fail. They were just that much stronger, that much more robust. And as a side benefit to the whole thing, the grip lasted longer. They just had more grip, they were better in every respect. The radial thing was a big thing for us. The move to N-Tech was another big thing. Those two were revolutions in my career that I can remember."
When Dunlop became the official...
When Dunlop became the official spec tire supplier for AMA Pro roadracing in '09, Allen's easygoing yet knowledgeable manner easily held court in front of the press. From left to right are Mike Buckley (Dunlop VP Motorcycle Tires), Dave Watkins (Dunlop Motorcycle Tyres UK Development Manager-Motorsport), Malcolm Board (Dunlop Motorcycle Tyres UK tire molding specialist), Allen, and Sebastian Mincone, who will be replacing Allen as USA roadracing manager.
Allen doesn't have to worry about tire specs or tire failures anymore. It was important to Dunlop that they be the tire brand in AMA Pro Racing, but without competition, racing isn't as much fun. For Allen the fun was "learning something new every time you go and just the satisfaction of working with a rider and making him happy, or learning something new that you can put into the report or something you can apply to the next time you build tires and stuff. That was a lot of the fun for me. So that's gone. And if that's what racing is, then if those are the rules, then we go racing under new rules and we do the best that we can. For me it's not as much fun. I still like racing. I still love racing. Still like the people."
And if DMG tore up the contract and offered open tire competition in 2011, Allen still prefers his weekend house in Ellicottville, New York, a charming ski town an hour south of Dunlop's U.S. headquarters in Buffalo.
"It's enough. The travel. I've been to all those race tracks and I've seen enough TSA guys to last me for a while. I wouldn't change my mind and come back, I don't think. The one thing you have to have in racing, whether you're going to do a good job at any part of it, you just have to be driven. You have to want to do it. You have to want to do it more than the next guy if you're going to win. And I quit racing myself, when I was finally honest with myself, when I said, 'you don't really want to do this any more.' But the thing you can't do is not be honest with yourself about it. It's a big mistake not to be honest with yourself. And if I'm honest with myself, it's enough. It's time to stop."
And start the next chapter.