Supercars confirms increased tyre allocations for 2020

The precise tyre allocations for the 2020 Virgin Australia Supercars Championship, which sees the abolition of tyre banks, have been confirmed.

An across-the-board increase in race weekend allocations as part of Supercars’ new deal with Dunlop means that drivers are set to spend more Friday practice time on new tyres.

The 2020 Supercars Operations Manual shows an increase from 436 new slick tyres to 504 for the season despite the calendar dropping by one event to 14.

A full 13 sets of new slicks will be issued to each car for the Supercheap Auto Bathurst 1000 weekend alone as part of the initiative which is also tipped to save teams money on tyre storage.

While the former naming system of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ compounds (as opposed to ‘soft’ and ‘super soft’ respectively) returns, the compounds to actually be used at each event largely remain the same.

The harder compound will still be used at Bathurst, the Superloop Adelaide 500, and at The Bend Motorsport Park, despite calls for the softer compound to be introduced for the OTR The Bend 500.

The Auckland Super400 will also see cars roll out on the harder compound, as they did at Pukekohe Park, despite that event being moved to Hampton Downs Motorsport Park.

As previously announced, the Melbourne 400 requires drivers to race on both compounds in each race, but mixing of tyre compounds in a single set is still not allowed.

All other events will be run on soft compound tyres only, while the wet allocations at each event remain unchanged (except that five sets are allocated at The Bend and four at Sandown due to the switch of venues for the 500km enduro).

A pre-marked set is also included in the allocation for each event, except for the Pirtek Enduro Cup events where cars take two pre-marked sets each, with the intention that they be used for warm-up runs.

With fresh tyres for the start of practice, teams are now only allowed to carry 40 slicks per Racing Entitlements Contract away from race events instead of 80.

The Dunlop Super2 Series will continue to be run on the harder compound at all tracks except Sandown, with two new and two pre-marked sets per car per round.

Virgin Australia Supercars Championship 2020 tyre allocation