Copyright 2002, Roadracing World Publishing, Inc.

By David Swarts

The annual Dunlop tire test at Daytona International Raceway remained on hold Tuesday due to rain, but officials have arranged to extend the test for an additional half-day on Thursday.

Tuesday started with heavy overnight rains ending, and the prospects of riders getting on track looking good. Riders took trips out onto course in pit vehicles to inspect the drying process early, but rain returned to the famed World Center of Racing at 11:30 a.m. local time and continued into the afternoon. At 1:30 p.m. Eastern Time, some teams had loaded their bikes into their trucks and left the circuit.

Only a few riders actually came to the track Tuesday, opting instead to stay at their hotel waiting to be called to the track by their teams if the track dried enough to ride.

In the meantime, Dunlop National Road Race Manager Jim Allen has made arrangements to extend the tire test into Thursday, December 12 but only until 1:00 p.m. Thursday. Even then, Allen says Dunlop engineers won’t be able to accomplish as much as they had hoped.

“Right away, as soon as you lose track time, you’ve got to prioritize,” said Allen. “It’s very likely that some of the stuff we brought won’t get tested or it won’t get tested as fully as we would have liked it to. If we have a full day tomorrow and a half-a-day on Thursday, we’ll have a-day-and-a-half instead of three days. We won’t be able to test as much or put the distance on as many tires as we wanted to do. We’ll just have to do the best we can.

“Over the years, we’ve been pretty damn lucky, really. We’ve never lost a full day here that I can recall. All the December tests I can recall, half-a-day here, half-a-day there, but I don’t think we’ve ever lost a full day. That goes back to the early ’90s, maybe before. So quite some time.”

Asked if he could spread the new and different compounds, constructions and sizes of Superbike slicks and Supersport DOT-labeled tires over all of the different riders to make the most of the available time, Allen said, “We do that anyway. We sit down, and let’s use Eric Bostrom as an example, he has a really good feel for compounds. So Eric will do the compound testing. Kurtis has a real good feel for casings. So we’ll have him test the casings.

“You get two or three guys to do each of those tasks. Then you can sort of put them together. Eric said this. Kurtis said this. Miguel said this, but he also said this. Then we’ll try and get Eric to try the casings and Kurtis to try the compounds and see what they say there.

“That’s what you try to do. It’s always dangerous to put all of your development into one guy. If the guy’s wrong, then you’re wrong. You try to get two or three different opinions. If they’re all divergent, then you’re really screwed. If they coincide, then that’s a pretty good indication that you’re on to something.”

Allen said that Dunlop brought 21 different combinations of Superbike tires, front and rear, and 16 different combinations of Supersport tires, front and rear, to test. Most of the tires are Daytona-specific, and at least half of the tires are new designs aimed at withstanding the new challenges presented by the revised chicane layout and resulting higher speeds.