MOTORSPORT
TW Tyres from Rugby has won the national final of Bridgestone’s First Stop Karting event held at Daytona Milton Keynes. The team claimed the prize after almost three hours of intense racing in the pouring rain at the famous outdoor circuit, beating 15 other teams in the process.
The Dunlop Tyres Motorcycle division has announced that its former design engineer Mark Sears will take up a new role as product support manager from 1 October 2011. Sears has 23 years of experience with Dunlop, having joined the company as an apprentice in 1988. He replaces Bryn Phillips directly in his latest role.
Six major motorsport championship titles were won this weekend in cars fitted with Dunlop tyres. In the penultimate round of the American Le Mans Series at Laguna Seca, California, another podium finish for Joey Hand and Dirk Mueller in BMW’s Rahal Letterman Lanigan (RLL) Racing Team Dunlop equipped BMW M3 GT meant the drivers, team and tyre manufacturer achieved their championship ambitions with one race still to run this season.
Federal fit its Couragia Mud Terrain tyres and branded livery to its sole sales distributer’s Jimmy Jeep in the recent Castrol 4×4 Jamboree in Zimbabwe. The event was held at the 4×4 Club site at Donnybrook, and “trail junky” Clarry Viljoen, sales manager from Taita Trading, ran the company’s Mud Terrain tyre to cope with tough conditions that varied between sand, dirt, hills and mud.
The Malay Mail reports that four armed intruders forced their way into a used-tyre factory in the township of Bandar Bukit Puchong, Malaysia, overpowering a security guard, who was bound and gagged, before driving off with a trailer loaded with 319 tyres.
Pirelli’s home race in Monza was run in high temperatures, presenting a good test for the company’s rubber following the blistering experienced at Spa. Pirelli’s motorsport director Paul Hembery commented: “Our first home race in the very special surroundings of Monza was everything that we hoped it would be, and the fact that there are five world champions in the top five just underlines the quality of the action.
In 2010, the Motorland Aragon circuit in the north-east of Spain represented a new challenge for Bridgestone, holding its first premier class motorcycle Grand Prix; this year the tyre supplier, the teams and the riders all have the benefit of last year’s data to call upon. Hiroshi Yamada, manager, Bridgestone Motorsport Department explains: “there was a lot of good feedback from everybody in the paddock. I am pleased that we are going back this year as it is an exciting and quite dramatic circuit, and with the benefit of last year’s experience not only is our job easier as we do not need to conduct more scientific analysis of the circuit and its tarmac, but we can also be very confident of our tyre compound choices.”
Over the coming two years Michelin will implement a partnership agreement with the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) in order to develop new actions to foster safer, more sustainable mobility. On September 8 the French manufacturer reported that its working relationship with the FIA during this time will be built on three policies, namely the improvement of road safety with a focus on raising awareness amongst young people, developing tyre innovations through motorsport competition that can be utilised to contribute to improved road use, and using competition as a vehicle for developing new solutions for reducing the environmental footprint of mobility in everyday life.
Lewis Hamilton set fastest time in the morning session for McLaren on the P Zero White medium tyres with a time of 1:23:865 as Pirelli’s home race weekend in the historic surroundings of Monza got underway. In the afternoon, Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel was quickest with a time of 1:24:010, set during an eight-lap run on the P Zero Yellow soft tyres.
“Compared with previous tracks such as Imola and Spa, Silverstone is very different because it has a lot of high speed corners requiring high downforce settings on the cars,” says Jean-Felix Bazelin, Dunlop Motorsport’s general manager. The brand is hoping for an advantage in its home leg of the Intercontinental Le Mans Cup at Silverstone for its fifth round on 9-11 September. The Silverstone 6 Hours takes place just over an hour away from the brand’s Birmingham base where tyres for all forms of two and four wheel motorsport around the world are produced.
Pirelli welcomed more than 200 fans to its Milan headquarters on Wednesday for the Formula One Teams Association Fans Forum event prior to the Italian Grand Prix this weekend. Formula One personalities Stefano Domenicali, Nico Rosberg and Jarno Trulli, as well as Pirelli’s motorsport director Paul Hembery, were the special guests, along with engineers Nicolo Petrucci (head of aerodynamics, Toro Rosso) and Giampaolo Dall’Ara (race engineer, Sauber). Hembery said the ability to “connect with the public” is “vital” in making the sport “more relevant and accessible than ever,” a feature of the current F1 philosophy that the company has maintained is influential in its decision to supply its tyres.
Kumho has furthered its long standing support for European F3 by extending its sponsorship of the annual Masters of F3 meeting by three years. The agreement was ratified during an official signing ceremony that followed this year’s event at Zandvoort on 13-14 August.
Pirelli motorsport director Paul Hembery has told Autosport.com that the tyre supplier to Formula One will seek a regulation change for 2012 to stop teams from wasting allocated rubber. The manufacturer currently supplies 11 sets of tyres to each driver – split between six harder and five softer compound P Zeros – which is resulting in wasted harder tyres, as teams prefer to run the quicker tyre. The fact that the softer, quicker compound will degenerate more quickly is circumvented by teams running less frequently, especially in qualifying, which has resulted in farcical sessions during which some drivers opt not to compete so as to preserve the softer tyres. The concern of waste tyres for Pirelli operates on both an ecological and an economical level, as the motorsport director explains.
Hankook is approaching the final quarter of the 2011 DTM season, its first as exclusive tyre partner of the German touring car series, with events in Oschersleben, Valencia and at the famous Hockenheimring at Baden-Württemberg to conclude this year’s series. The manufacturer took the opportunity to set out its tyre development for the 2012 season during the UK leg at Brands Hatch, and the most striking feature of the new Ventus tyre will be its increased dimensions – a development that Hankook says will help bring down lap times next year.
Jorge Lorenzo resisted pressure from pole-sitter Casey Stoner in the early stages of to take a dominant victory and set a new lap record. Dani Pedrosa chased down Stoner and passed him on lap 23 to finish second, meaning that Stoner’s championship lead over Lorenzo is now down to 35 points leaving the title wide open for the remaining five races of the season.
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