Star driver Shane Van Gisbergen enjoys racing New Zealand’s BNT V8 SuperTourers more than his Australian V8 Supercar.
The Kiwi cars – headline act in the year-long Hankook Super Series — are virtually as fast as the Aussie ones, but they suit Van Gisbergen’s flamboyant driving style better.
The young Aucklander likes to push his car as hard as possible all through a race, and he finds he can do that in the New Zealand competition because the tyres stand up to all the punishment he gives them.
The SuperTourers run Hankook tyres very similar to those used in the high-tech DTM (German touring car championship) and they deliver very consistent performance, whereas the tyres used in Australia lose their grip after a while. That means the Supercars have to stop to change tyres or else slow down to nurse their tyres to the finish.
Van Gisbergen can make a direct comparison after racing both types of car at Pukekohe this year. The cost-effective Kiwi cars were only a second slower overall and were faster in some sections of the high-speed track.
“You have a lot more grip with this [Hankook] tyre once it heats up after 20 laps and you are so much later [braking] into turn one and can carry so much more speed,” Van Gisbergen, who has finished as high as fourth in the Supercar championship, says.
“The biggest thing for me and it was what we showed in that last race was that it was max, at 110 percent and we were sliding and locking brakes everywhere and it was five zero, five zero, five zero on the lap times.
“In a Supercar you just cannot do that, the tyre cannot cope, and that’s one of the things I enjoy as a driver. We were just flat all the way and you can’t do that in a Supercar. The car’s good under brakes and the tyre gives you confidence to brake late.”
Van Gisbergen acknowledges that the Australian setup introduces some interesting complexities into race strategy, such as how many pit stops to make and when the driver should slow down to make his tyres last longer. But really he just wants to go hard all the time.
“When we race [Supercars] at Perth and even Austin [in the United States] to an extent we are driving round at 50 percent,” he says. “You are driving to what the car is whereas here you drive to yourself and the car is a lot more rewarding for sure.”
New Kiwi star Scott McLaughlin, who is the defending SuperTourer champion and has won V8 Supercar races this year in his debut season, also prefers the Hankooks.
“You can push it harder over a longer time; it gives enough grip that you can feel when it’s overheating but you stop sliding it, give it a lap to cool, and it recovers,” he said at Taupo’s Gull 250 meeting. “Even when you’re testing, you can still do the same lap time for a long time.”
The tyres’ durability will be tested to the utmost in the coming three-round V8 SuperTourer endurance series, starting with the Waikato 400 at Hampton Downs on September 28-29. This series, which will complete the overall 2013 BNT V8 SuperTourers championship, takes in five races of 200km and two of 150km.
Last year’s inaugural series showed that the SuperTourers could race hard for a whole endurance race on one set of tyres, which surprised many people. A few teams chose to change one or two tyres during the compulsory driver change, but most just stayed with the original set of tyres.
“If there’s a ‘negative’ – in inverted commas – to the Hankook tyres it’s that they are actually too good, they last too long,” Auckland V8 stalwart Andy Booth says.
Booth holds that opinion because he thinks tyre changes – perhaps compulsory ones – would make the races more exciting and strategic, and would get the crew members more involved in the event.
“It’s interesting talking to a lot of guys in Australia who want to find out more about SuperTourers and they’re all talking about the tyres because everyone who’s driven them has gone back raving about the tyres,” Booth says.
When Hankook developed the SuperTourer tyre they found it actually exceeded their expectations.
However Hankook race tyre development engineer Roy Cha, who was involved in the V8 SuperTourers testing process, says he was not really surprised by the performance of the tyres for the Kiwi cars because the company had put so much effort into developing tyres for different race series around the world.
“The V8 SuperTourer chassis is highly developed and an excellent race car,” Cha says. “In testing we saw similar results to what we see in DTM racing. Being able to transfer that expertise was a great advantage for Hankook.”
