Drivers Coming to Grips With New Pirelli DHG Tire

Photo: John Dagys

GT World Challenge America powered by AWS drivers have been coming to grips with Pirelli’s P-Zero DHG tire compound, which is making its North American racing debut this weekend at Road America.

Competitors, some whom have previous experience on the new-for-2025 tire from the recent CrowdStrike 24 Hours of Spa, have given mixed initial feedback on the latest-generation compound that first debuted in GT World Challenge Europe powered by AWS and the DTM earlier this year.

It has replaced Pirelli’s DHF, which has been in use in SRO Motorsports Group-run series and other GT3 championships since 2022.

“It’s a little bit different,” Turner Motorsport’s Robby Foley told Sportscar365.

“We started the test day on the old tire just to understand where we liked our car on that tire, and then went to the new tire.

“It definitely changed the balance of the car slightly. For us, we gained a little bit more front-end on the late entry of low-speed corners.

“It’s a little bit faster on one lap but with a little bit more tire deg, so that could change the racing dynamic slightly.

“Obviously we’re still learning about it. It’s tough because the track conditions change here a bit from morning to afternoon, as any track does, so some of the reads we’re getting is because of the track changes.

“In general, it’s a new challenge. I think our car, at least here at this track wants to be in a slightly different window, so we’re trying to find that now.

“But it’s definitely fun to have a little curve ball in the middle of the year.”

Mercedes-AMG factory driver Philip Ellis, who drives for Regulator Racing, meanwhile, shared a different feeling, at least on how it performs on the Mercedes-AMG GT3 Evo.

“The tire feels a bit more sensitive on temperature, meaning it’s harder to get it to the working window,” Ellis told Sportscar365.

“The old compound was a bit easier to get up to temperature and keep it there, and this one feels harder to get there, and also maintaining it there to where you want it to be.

“With that we have a small balance change, especially on the rear. We lost a bit of rear stability on our car, which we already experienced in Spa.

“But Spa was a bit different as we had the heated tire and here we have the cold tire, so it’s not quite the same, where in Spa, we’d go out on a hot tire and the temperature comes down, so it’s hard to keep it where we wanted it.

“Here, it’s hard to get it to where we want to. So it’s a bit different.

“At some point it gets there but it takes very long. Up to that point you’re fighting the balance of it a bit more than we did with the old tire.”

Ellis feels that the DHG will require a new strategy when it comes to qualifying.

“I don’t think it’s going to be harder to qualify on the tire, it’s just going to take longer,” he said.

“Tracks like [Road America], it might be really bad because you end up with less push laps than you have available because you may need one lap more to get it to work in the window.

“We’ve seen it in testing that this tire is much more sensitive to graining. If the tires are cold and you really lean on the front, you’ll grain the front tires and then you’ll never get anything out of it.

“It will be really tough in qualifying because we have a 2:07 lap and you might need three laps to warm them up. so you end up with two laps. It used to be out-lap, prep and you go.

“Now it’s out, prep, prep, still-not-really-there, and so you just run out of time in the end.”

GMG Racing pilot and Porsche Motorsport North America Selected Driver Tom Sargent, who also has previous experience with the DHG at Spa, also believes the biggest difference comes with warm-up.

“It is quite different,” he said. “The warm-up phase seems to be the biggest difference at the moment. We haven’t done any kind of longer runs on it, so I’m not 100 percent sure what that’s going to be like.

“But ultimately the peak grips feels good. We’ll find out what the times are like.

“The tire is different for sure and just needs a little bit of a different working [setup] compared to the other compound.

“It’s still new for us. I’ll have a much better idea by the end of the weekend.”

Foley added that the DHG has not turned the BMW M4 GT3 EVO’s car setup “upside down” having credited the car’s adaptability for accepting a wide range of tire offerings.

“We’ve done mostly long runs on heavy fuel for the race to try and understand our worst-case scenario just in terms of weight of the car and putting laps on it,” he explained.

“We’ve definitely seen a bit of a peak and some fall-off but it’s fairly consistent in how it falls off once it does the initial dip in lap time, for us, it’s been pretty consistent.

“That’s what we’re trying to work on to minimize that lap time loss over a stint.

“It feels like a different iteration of the same tire. It feels like it’s a Pirelli and feels familiar. It’s just the subtleties that are different.”

Jonathan Grace contributed to this report

John Dagys

John Dagys is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Sportscar365. Dagys spent eight years as a motorsports correspondent for FOXSports.com and SPEED Channel and has contributed to numerous other motorsports publications worldwide. Contact John