British Touring Car Championship tyre suppliers Dunlop will introduce a new compound medium tyre from this weekend’s round of the championship at Oulton Park, which had already been tested in 2014 and during the pre-season tests.

The new “Dunlop Sport Maxx BTCC Medium” compound tyre replaces the ones used during the first two race weekends at Brands Hatch and Donington Park, with Thruxton having its own special compound due to the nature of the country’s fastest circuit.

There are no changes to the soft compound tyre, which had helped produced some dynamic races during the first two race meetins, which with some car configurations there had been a sizable drop-off in performance after a few laps.

“Even though we are the sole supplier, we are always looking to introduce new developments that can benefit the teams and the racing,” said Michael Butler, Dunlop’s BTCC Manager. “The new tyre uses new materials that have been proven in our successful GT Endurance racing programmes and we decided that applying these new technologies would benefit the BTCC tyre.”

In respect of the soft tyre degradation seen at Donington Park, Butler added:

“We did see a bigger than expected difference between the two tyres at the recent Donington race, but this was due to colder than expected track conditions. During the Summer months, we expect the performance difference between the current Soft and the new Medium to be similar to 2014. We will consider applying the same material changes to the 2016 Soft tyre if we find it is necessary after analysing the results from this season.”