Rockstar Makita Suzuki's Blake...
Rockstar Makita Suzuki's Blake Young was one of the many riders who found himself pushing the front end on the newly repaved banking at Daytona. (photo by Henny Ray Abrams)
Rockstar Makita Suzuki’s Blake Young was flying around the glass-smooth, freshly paved east banking at Daytona International Speedway when the front end did something he’d never felt before…at 190-plus.
“It was really kind of a weird feeling because you didn’t really get much…it didn’t really let you know it was going to do it,” Young said after setting the second fastest time of the December 19-20 test. “It just almost kind of happened and it was back before you knew it happened and you went, 'Wow!' You know, obviously, not a good feeling when we’re ripping around here at the top of sixth gear.”
Young wasn’t the only rider to get a high-speed wakeup call, but he was the only one whose front tire lost a piece of rubber. It was small – about half an inch – but given the speeds at Daytona and the stakes involved, the loss raised a number of red flags. The front tire the four Superbike riders were using was a development tire (they used the same rears as in this year’s races) and one they were hoping would be race worthy come March. Instead, Dunlop’s engineers had to go back to work to reformulate a dual compound front that will withstand the new stresses placed on the front by the grippier fresh pavement. The rears had so much grip, and suffered so little wear, that they were putting added stress on the fronts, a not uncommon tire problem. Only this time, the problem wasn’t entirely in the tire.
Dunlop found that the repaved...
Dunlop found that the repaved banking at Daytona was increasing the rear tire grip so much that now the front tires were wearing too much. (photo by Nelson & Riles)
The first day of the tire test was almost a complete waste of time. A light mist kept everyone off the track for much of the day and the riders who did go out later on were riding on a very cold racetrack, far colder than what is expected for the season-opener. The fronts would certainly work, but was there a way to make them work better?
A typical Daytona dual compound has a very hard left side to withstand the G-forces of the banking, and a softer right side, to handle the few right-hand turns in the infield and the chicane. The balance is 60% hardness on the left side, 40% on the right. With temperatures so low, and the fear of cold tearing, among other things, the decision was made to swap the fronts, to put the softer side on the left.
“What we did yesterday is we had a look at the front tire,” Dunlop’s road race manager Sabastian Mincone said. “We were looking at the asphalt, we thought we could run that tire in one direction and today we turned the tires the other way and it’s working much better.
“Basically, the new tires we built, looking at the asphalt the way it is right now, the difference between the two compounds is not as severe as it was before. We saw that the temperature was very low, so we did that test. And today we turned that around. We wanted to try to find out everything.”
But, according to interviews with the Superbike riders, they weren’t made aware of the change.
“I heard that we actually ran tires backwards yesterday,” Graves Yamaha’s Josh Hayes said. “I had heard that in the evening yesterday, but that was all I knew of it. I didn’t have any problems running it that way yesterday.” When told of the change on Sunday evening, “It kind of made sense. I wasn’t pushing to the point where I really had any issues. I was kind of building slowly the whole day. With that, I never got to exploring deep enough that I had any issues where I lost the front or anything like that. I’m glad somebody sorted it out before I had to figure it out the hard way.”
Asked if his tire was flopped, Rockstar Makita Suzuki’s Tommy Hayden said, “I think it was." As to why he didn’t notice it, especially in the infield, he said, “Well, I noticed we had a front end issue and I blamed it kinda on the track. Came in, said 'Something feels weird.' I thought something was cold, new pavement. I wasn’t sure what. Something was weird. A couple times I came in I lost some tire pressure because it wasn’t heating right and felt weird. I come in, they check the pressure and it dropped a little and I thought, 'something just doesn’t seem right.' And then later on I found out that was the issue.”
Hayden’s teammate Blake Young said he had a “little bit of a problem in the beginning of yesterday and it was really kind of tough with just the conditions the way they were. Just getting a little bit of a front tire push coming through the tri-oval there. We flipped the tire today and played with pressures a little bit today. And seemed like it made things a bit better. But I think Dunlop’s going to come back with something a little bit better for the next test.”
Graves Yamaha’s Hayes felt the same way. Following the second day he said he “lost the front” a couple of times, always in “areas where there was the added input of me changing direction on the banking or something like that.” He added, “Whenever you start putting input to move yourself on the banking I tended to have a problem.”
But Hayes had been through tire problems with a number of tracks—Barber, Mid-Ohio, Miller—that were new or had been repaved and the fronts shredded within a few laps.
“Dunlop, it didn’t go as methodical as I thought it would as far as going out there,” Hayes said. “They just kind of let us go out there and ride. But after doing just a couple laps, you’d come in, you’d look at it, you’d go, 'OK'. You pushed on it a little bit (Sunday), but the weather was kind of iffy. (Monday) we progressed a bit further and we got to finding some limits so we’ve got some work to do.”
The combination of the flopped front tire and the cold surface caused Hayes to describe the track as “numb.” He added, “It’s hard to really feel a whole lot of what was going on with the motorcycle. I think a part of that especially yesterday when we were running the tire backwards; I was on the hard side of the tire when I was tipped over to the right. I wasn’t going to feel anything.”
The plan all along was to have two tests, a more exclusive first test—there were four Superbikes and four Daytona SportBikes, though more teams and riders were invited—for testing the first generation of development tires. Any rider who’s planning on competing in the March races will be invited to the mid-January test. Those tires will be built with the data gathered last week, though the initial tires were constructed with a wealth of data.
“We had a lot of information,” Dunlop’s Mincone said. “We had a few people that they came here to take some impressions and we had some information. The racetrack has been very good with us. They shared information also. We’re part of the Goodyear group and NASCAR, also we shared some information there too.” He added, “We were 90-95% sure that was going to work on this asphalt.”
With the rears in good shape, Dunlop can concentrate on the fronts for the second test, though they plan on also improving the rears, even though they showed little wear after 30 laps, nearly twice race distance.
“What we’re going to do is we’re going to build maybe one or two specs for the front and also the same thing for the rear,” Dunlop’s Mincone said. “We’re going to try to find some different solutions. What we’re trying to do is not just for the January test, we’re going to also see what we can carry on to the March race and also what’s going to happen for next year.
“What we’re going to do when we come back in January, we’re going to try to come with other tires,” he said. “We’re going to try to improve performance, everything.”