EVEN the team which suffered most during the new Dunlop wet tyre’s first full race has hailed it a “brilliant” creation.
There’s been just one blemish in Triple Eight Race Engineering’s domination of the first quarter of the 2024 Repco Supercars Championship: Race 1 of the Taupō Super400.
Dealt with wet conditions, both Will Brown and Broc Feeney struggled, ultimately finishing ninth and 21st respectively. It’s the only instance where either car has finished outside the top four this season.
Dunlop’s newer, softer wet rubber was introduced at the start of last year, but it took until April 2024 at Taupō for a belated race debut.
Triple Eight team manager Mark Dutton sung the tyre’s praises, despite his squad’s fortunes on it.
“As a category would we still have been able to race on the old wet, if you car matched? Yes,” Dutton told V8 Sleuth.
“Would the drivers have commented about how much grip they felt? No.
“Would Triple Eight have done better? Yes.
“We didn’t do the best job because of the new wet and because we have got 20-odd years of racing with the old wet – we had so much history on the old wet that we didn’t do a good enough job on the new wet. That’s on us.
“But as far as the wet tyre goes, it is brilliant. It generates grip, the drivers can drive it hard.
“It was really, really cool to hear them coming back in after running on it and talking about the grip.
“It meant you were still having a proper race; in the past with the old wet, it was so hard – literally – that there was such compromises and you were just nursing it, getting around.
“With the new one, they’re racing out there, they’re still braking hard and having good corner speed and good exits in the wet.
“If you had it for a full weekend, the car would be a lot more sensitive to your tuning changes because it’s a proper wet tyre.”
The race win went to Brad Jones Racing’s Andre Heimgartner, who also mastered inclement conditions to take the maiden victory of his Supercars career three years ago at The Bend.
