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"The long and short of it is that, including last year's race tires, we had about eight viable race tires, tires you could race on," Allen said. "The motorcycles themselves eliminate some. Working with the Hondas, they're going to be hard on tires. They're going to be fast, but they're going to be hard on tires. The soft race compound that suited Kawasakis last year - Kurtis [Roberts] blistered one in seven laps. We sort of threw it on the third day with Kurtis to see what would happen and we got the answer pretty quickly. We thought that would be the case and we started them with hards." "The front tire is definitely better," Roberts said. "The rear - I don't know if it's our setting or what, but I'm not particularly happy with the rear. We used a couple of different ones. I haven't noticed a big, substantial difference in all of them yet. Last year's tires don't seem much different tires than this year's. And so far we've actually got last year's working the best for longer runs, but we haven't really done that many long runs just because of how I'm feeling. But we've got some other stuff to test this afternoon. We've got a lot of stuff to do before we make the perfect tire decision. I don't notice a great difference at all. It's very little." Roberts' Honda teammate, Miguel DuHamel, didn't get through all of the tires. They struggled with a front-end glitch that didn't allow him to complete the test cycle. "I never did a qualifier," he said. "I just did a race tire. I tried one of those new, taller tires that Dunlop brought over on the new bike and I did 50.8 and a string of 52s until. .. uh, the chain link broke or something." "We had a 195/65 and a 190/60," Allen said. "The 190/60 is the one we're going to make, the most produceable. We ran with Nicky [Hayden] and he did that 20-lap stint and stopped after 16. He did blister the rear tire. We know what happened and we know why it happened, and we talked it over with Honda at the track and showed them what countermeasure we're going to make. I think he ran 14 to15 laps and finished up on another tire. You need to have a 20 to 22-laps tire. It'll be the three Hondas and [Mat] M1adin that'll be the toughest on tires." This testing stuff Is easy. Both Nicky Hayden and Dunlop's Jim Allen had reason to smile at the Daytona tire test. Hayden was the fastest of the Superbike men, and Allen's Dunlops worked well. Nicky Hayden goes fIat·out on last year's Honda Re5t at Daytona International Speedway. Hayden spent time on both last year's RCSt and the 2002 model, but his fastest lap came on the old bike. .. U .... n _ _ os • JANUARY 9, 2002 27