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Jamie Whincup says Supercars’ new super soft tyre is “pointing in the right direction” after his first laps on it at Queensland Raceway.
The post-season test saw the Triple Eight Race Engineering driver and Will Davison of Dick Johnson Racing sample the new compound.
The test took place in hot conditions, with the pair completing race simulations upwards of 30 laps.
While he wouldn’t be drawn on the finer details of the test results, the seven-time Supercars champion was pleased.
“Although it’s 2020 and we did a lot of testing with soft and hard compounds, now we’re introducing new compounds and seeing if we can introduce it for the 2021 season,” Whincup told Speedcafe.com.
“I can’t talk too much about the results yet. They’ll go back to Supercars and they’ll throw it in the mix. I guess I can say there were no failures.
“The tyres that we asked to deliver, they had done a good job with that. It’s all pointing in the right direction.”
The new super soft compound tyre is designed to be consistently quick, have a shorter life span, and suffer significant fall-off towards the end of a stint.
Whincup said he hoped the new tyre would be beneficial to the championship.
Supercars is expected to make a decision shortly after the tyre evaluation as to whether the super soft tyre will be run in 2021.
“I’d just like to see better racing,” said Whincup.
“From a driving point of view, you just want to have maximum grip and go as fast as you can and feel the g-forces. That doesn’t necessarily provide the best racing
“Without being selfish and biased, whatever gives us better racing and the cars become closer and we can just scrap it out, that’s what I’m looking for, for 2021.
“We always, as engineers and drivers, push the limits,” he added.
“We try to hurt the tyre, so to speak. Then when we do go too far and push the limits a little bit too far, (Dunlop are) always there to help out and give us advice as well.
“They’ve been fantastic as per usual.”
