V8 SUPERCARS will put a ‘supersoft’ tyre compound to the test in coming months as the category considers introducing the tyre into the sport in 2016.
The move comes as the V8 Supercars Commission weighs up potential changes to race formats for next year’s season following criticism of the opening 60-kilometre ‘super sprint’ races of 2015.
The ‘supersoft’ will be tested along with two new variants of Dunlop’s existing ‘soft’ compound tyre, first introduced to the sport in 2009 to complement the existing ‘control’ or ‘hard’ compound tyre.
“The plan is to test a couple of different compounds of tyre and then report back to the Commission on the performance of those tyres,” David Stuart, V8 Supercars sporting and technical director, told the sport’s official site.
“So we will do a qualifying run, a race run on them and evaluate the speed and the degradation of the tyre and report that back to the Commission.
“That, I guess, will all be taken into the mix of what happens as far as a tyre. I can’t really say anything about change of race formats … but I imagine they would take the tyres into consideration for what they want to do.” Although no key details regarding the test have been determined — including choosing a test track, and determining a driver and team to perform the testing — Stuart said V8’s technical team will be analysing key performance indicators across all three types of tyre.
“What we’ll be looking at is the behaviour and the performance characteristics of the tyre,” he said. “And that’ll be tied into the ultimate one lap qualifying pace of the tyre, and then how the tyre performs over a simulated race run.
“We’ll have to look at what the average run the tyres have been (doing), pick a number there and run thorough X amounts of laps consecutively and look at the tyre performance and degradation and how the tyre holds up.
“There are a couple of different compounds that are coming from Japan which are variants of the soft tyre compound of the current soft tyre.”
FOX SPORTS’ V8 Supercars analyst Russell Ingall recently urged the category to introduce a ‘supersoft’ style tyre in order to give driver more grip and encourage better racing.