This weekend marks the half-point stage of the 2004 season for the teams. It is Dunlop’s tenth year of being involved with the race and third season as sole tyre supplier. Even that level of experience hasn’t allowed the Dunlop team to rest on its laurels. Michael Butler, Dunlop Motorsport explains:

“This has been a fantastic season – perhaps the best ever but not without its challenges. Our first race at Donington was on the newly surfaced track so we had no knowledge of tyre performance. We had more sliding so the wear rate was higher and that wasn’t helped by the cold conditions. Similarly the GTs hadn’t raced at Mondello Park and it’s not really a ‘GT circuit’ so we had more unknowns there. They were races where we just had to work closely with the teams to make sure that everyone had the information to make their choices.

Our problems come with events such as Snetterton. There we had eight punctures from the flint on the track during testing. It is notorious but fortunately we were able to get the track cleaned for the races and there we no more incidences. When the racing’s so close it’s not the sort of thing we want to decide results on.

For me what makes British GT so strong is the diversity of cars – 15 different models, the quality of drivers and the resulting close finishes

– Snetterton was a great example of that in both classes and both races.” The Dunlop team will be at the Oulton Park circuit for the next fifth round of the British GT Championship on 17th & 18th July. The team consists of over ten support staff to fit and engineer for 28 cars. The team provides soft, medium and hard compounds, an intermediate and a wet specification in the required thirteen different tyre sizes and will bring over 600 tyres to the track for the GT teams alone.