Dunlop Drivers Cup

Two laps into my four-lap ATV (a.k.a. "quad") timed run, it's clear that the rear brakes are useless. I step on the pedal and nothing! "Probably jammed with mud," I think to myself. Three laps in, I'm going fairly well despite that: downhill past the start/finish, left around a tree, through the big puddle, right, left, up the big hill, hard left, then left again to the steep downhill.

This time I grab the front hand brake at the crest to slow my descent—and my thumb hits the throttle. D'oh! Now, accelerating downhill way too fast, no way I'll make the sharp right at the bottom. The challenge becomes missing the big tree just beyond...which I do, barely, by steering left into a big bale of hay. Whoomff! I find reverse, back out and power back on course. But my run is done. Off-course equals DNF (did not finish). Damn!


A few weeks earlier, I had jumped on an ATV with no previous experience at the Dunlop Drivers Cup (DDC) 2005 U.S. qualifiers on a rough, rocky course at Phoenix Firebird Raceway, and ended up setting one of the faster times. Okay, I was overconfident, so this sloppy November mud run near Dieskau, Germany, turned out less well. I was grateful we'd done the motorcycle motocross on a dry course the day before. I had survived it, upright and unscathed, unlike two U.S. teammates who were now limping around in considerable pain.

DDC is Born

It was 1998 when performance tire-maker Dunlop organized the first DDC in Germany. The idea was to expose a carefully selected group of amateur enthusiasts to a competition program combining diverse driving skills with safety awareness, adventure and knowledge of how a vehicle's tires impact its handling. Following a series of rigorous qualifying events, the 11 best two-person teams traveled to Patagonia, South America, for the finals in March 1999.


The next year saw 13 teams duke it out in a variety of Finals competitions across the American west, in Arizona, Utah and Nevada. DDCs three through seven sent 15 European teams to Finals in such far-away places as South Africa, Australia, Malaysia, Mexico and Italy.