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Donnan explains: “Before Avon had its problems and the tyre market went a bit bonkers in lockdown, the Yokohama tyres were about £600 a set. Some people would run a set for every meeting or even more, because cost wasn’t an issue. Then all of a sudden they jumped up to about£1000 a set and we said
‘look, this just can’t goon’. So we limited the number of tyres.

“Then the discussion was how do we monitor this? The first way we did it was each competitor would take a photograph of their barcodes, because all tyres are barcoded, and upload them to a WhatsApp group, but there’s no way to check that in pare ferme. So last season I was trying to look for a solution and people were saying using barcode scanners. “There is an application on the phone for using the barcode scanner or even the phone to read barcodes off tyres and store them in a database to the cloud.

You just scan any tyre and it will say that tyre is registered to this competitor, or this tyre is not registered and therefore it’s illegal. Certainly it’s been a major impact on costs. Instead of spending £3000-4000 on tyres you’ re spending £2000-3000. I ran all but the last event on one set of tyres.
“The app [from Canadian firm Racer Scan] was developed for karting, where they’re very stringent on tyres, but it hasn’t been used in a car circuit format before. But the app was flexible enough to suit our needs.

“We’ve got a new scrutineer joining us next year who came to Snetterton to have a look at us and he was a bit ‘I’m not sure how that will all work’ and then he saw it in action, said “blimey’, because previously you’re actually having to look up sheets of paper and see if that’s the right tyre number for this competitor. So simple things, but they make life easier and it avoids argument.”