As the European Le Mans Series and FIA World Endurance Championship teams prepare for the next rounds in their respective championships, here’s a look at how Dunlop and our partner teams performed at the flagship event,  the Le Mans 24h :

Dunlop’s 2015 Le Mans 24 Hours In Numbers – LMP2 finishers:

• Top five finishers on Dunlop tyres
• Eight out of top ten finishers on Dunlop tyres
• Three different race leaders – all on Dunlop tyres
• Winning car used just nine sets tyres for 24 hour race
• All three Dunlop slick options quadruple stinted – with distances over 650km

Durability & Versatility

All three slick compounds raced on track on different cars at the same time.

The winning KCMG Oreca-Nissan completed the race using just nine sets of tyres compared to Jota’s 2014 win using eleven proving the durability of the latest specification Dunlop.

KCMG set a new LMP2 distance record under the current rules: 358 laps in 24 hours – 2 faster than Jota’s 356 in 2014.

63% of KCMG’s 33 stints between pitstops lasted over 160km.

Richard Bradley (KCMG) drove the longest quadruple stint in LMP2 covering 49 laps (667.8 km) on a single set of Dunlops.

Pace

The top 22 driver fastest laps in LMP2 were set on Dunlop tyres.

The fastest Dunlop-shod lap time was 4.115 seconds faster than the fastest non-Dunlop lap.

Oliver Turvey (Jota) set the fastest lap of the race on tyres that had already completed over 230 kilometres.

Jota set all three fastest sector times in 2015. Oliver Turvey beat his own 2014 fastest sector one time by 0.482 seconds (1.4%) with Dunlop-shod LMP2cars faster than some LMP1 entries in the twistier first and third sectors.

The fastest LMP2 lap of 3:36.679 was set by Oliver Turvey in the Jota Gibson over a whole second faster than the 2014 fastest lap of 2014 (Nelson Panciatici/Signatech Alpine car/ 3:37.7870.

Competitiveness

The top three laps were set by drivers from three different teams in three different cars (Oliver Turvey’s Jota-Gibson, Nicolas Lapierre’s KCMG-Oreca & Sam Bird’s G-Drive-Ligier).

Unlike in 2014, when winners Jota Sport led 9% of the race, 2015 winners KCMG led 349 of the 358 laps (97.5%). Three teams led: KCMG, Murphy Prototypes (1 lap) & Thiriet By TDS Racing (8 laps)

Mike McGregor, Manager Race Support, Design & Development

“The feedback we had from the teams before the race was very positive so we were optimistic of some great performances but to have a range of tyres that performed so well is something of which we are very proud. To be able to quadruple stint all three slick options and to run all three options simultaneously on different chassis showed the versatility of the tyres. The fact that the top three cars finished on the same lap and each used strategies focusing on different tyres in the range underlines how the tyres played their part in making the 2015 Le Mans 24 Hours closer and faster than ever.”