Round four of the FIA World Endurance Championship takes place in the USA on Saturday 20th September at the Circuit of the Americas. Dunlop’s two regular LMP2 teams, G-Drive Racing and KCMG, will be rising to the challenge of regaining points after their Le Mans retirements. The squads have five rounds to overcome the deficit of 25 and 40 points respectively with a maximum 26 points available at each round making that readily achievable. Local team Extreme Speed Motorsports have also chosen to compete on Dunlop tyres.

Last year was the first visit to the track for the championship so teams now have race data to give a head start on getting the best chassis and tyre performance, working with Dunlop’s engineers to optimise the package for the track and individual drivers. This year the Texan anticlockwise track, with 41 metres of elevation changes, will see racing start in the afternoon and run into night with the six hour race beginning at 17.00.

Dunlop Teams:

26 – G-Drive Racing, Morgan Nissan, Roman Rusinov, Olivier Pla, Julien Canal
30  – Extreme Speed Motorsports, HPD ARX Honda, Scott Sharp, Ryan Dalziel, Ed Brown
47 – KCMG, Oreca 03 Nissan, Matthew Howson, Richard Bradley, Alexandre Imperatori

Dunlop has nominated the medium and hard compound slick tyres for the COTA event.

Racing Stat – It Helps To Be At The Front

To win you need to lead. In WEC, Dunlop led 1283 of the 1447 laps in 2013 in LMP2  – that’s 88.7%. Dunlop has led all of the 670 laps raced in 2014 so far.

Mike McGregor, Dunlop Motorsport:
“It’s good to be coming back to the track rather than racing for the first time. As much as we can test and simulate race conditions it’s good to know that we have a comprehensive understanding of the surface in race conditions. The first two sectors are high speed with sector three being slower and twisty so there’s a bit of everything required.

“The teams were happy with tyre performance last year and our 2014 tyres are another step forward in performance so we are optimistic that they will have what they need to do well.”

Dunlop’s 2014 LMP2 Tyres – Key Points

• New rear tyre profile that complements the front profile introduced in 2013.
• All constructions are new
• New for 2014 hard and soft compounds.
• New profile and construction for full wet tyre
• New profile and groove pattern for intermediate tyre

2014 Tyre restrictions – six-hour races:
Seven sets of slick tyres, with three for practice sessions and four sets for qualifying and the race. Typically, with no major safety car periods, a dry race will see teams race three double and one single stints.