A senior NASCAR executive says “we’re baffled” why tires didn’t wear as much in last weekend’s Cup race at Bristol compared to the March event there.
Kyle Larson led 462 of 500 laps and won last Saturday’s race at Bristol Motor Speedway by seven seconds. That race had eight lead changes.
The spring Bristol race, which featured excessive tire wear, had 54 lead changes. Denny Hamlin won that race by one second.
The same tire compound was used in both races. The decision to bring back the same tire was made after a July 16-17 Goodyear test at Bristol with six teams.
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That the two races at Bristol produced different results is what led Elton Sawyer, NASCAR senior vice president of competition, to say Tuesday morning on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio: “We’re baffled, to be perfectly honest. We felt like that we had a recipe there from the spring that gave us what we’re looking for in our short track racing, putting kind of the tire management back in the driver’s hands.
“We’ve seen some great racing throughout the year. Richmond comes to mind. Watkins Glen, just a week ago with great tire fall-off. The anticipation, as we rolled into Bristol, was that we would see something very similar. Obviously, we didn’t see that as the weekend started to unfold.”
With tires not wearing as much as the spring, drivers ran similar lap times. That made passing difficult. With drivers needing to manage their tires in the March race, positions changed often as some slowed to save tires while others sped up to gain track position before reverting to tire-saving mode.
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Sawyer noted on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio that the concrete track at Bristol didn’t take rubber in the March race but did in last weekend’s race.
“What we didn’t have is tire wear,” Sawyer said. “We’ll dive into that with our meetings today with our folks at Goodyear to see what maybe they have been able to come up with over the last couple of days in their meetings. Obviously, we were disappointed as a company for our fans. Those are things we’ll learn from and we’ll figure out what happened and get that corrected as we go forward.
“I think the big thing we have to keep in mind is these things happen throughout time, whether it’s a race event or you go into any type of sporting event and, as you guys said earlier, you’ll have a blowout every now and then. We just need to figure out what happened, how we’re going to correct it and move forward because we have had some really good short track racing, as well as road course racing, this year. Goodyear’s tire has really contributed a great deal to that.”
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The final two races of the season — Martinsville and Phoenix — will be on tracks 1 mile or less in length.
The tire that will be used at Martinsville will be different from that track’s spring event. The new Martinsville tire will be what was called the option tire at Richmond. That was the tire that had more wear at Richmond.
There won’t be a change to the tire for the championship race at Phoenix.
“When we get to our championship weekend, we want our teams and our drivers to have a real understanding of what they’re walking into,” Sawyer said of the tire that will be used there.
