NASCAR and Goodyear wanted to see tire wear on Saturday; It didn’t happen
The Spring race at Bristol saw extreme tire wear. At the time, it was a mystery as to why but it created one of the best races of the season. It was a happy accident.
Goodyear hosted a tire test a few months ago. They applied resin to the track and discovered that was the cause of the tire wear.
NASCAR and Goodyear went into last weekend with the plan of producing a similar product. However, that didn’t happen. We saw teams running 100 laps with very limited tire wear.
Goodyear tire wear will purposefully be a part of the story at Bristol
NASCAR comments on Bristol tire wear
“We felt like we had a recipe there from the spring that gave us what we’re looking for in our short track racing, putting the tire management back in the driver’s hands,” Elton Sawyer told SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.
“We’ve seen some great racing throughout the year. Richmond comes to mind. Watkins Glen just a week ago, with great tire fall-off. So the anticipation as we rolled into Bristol was we would see something very similar.”
“The goal was to at least put the cars in the bottom of the racetrack, give us two lanes to race,” Sawyer said of Bristol.
“We did see that throughout the event, they’d run at the bottom, middle, and top. So, we did have multiple grooves.”
“What we didn’t have was tire wear. 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 but those are things we’ll learn from, figure out what happened, and get that corrected as we go forward.”
NASCAR reacts after accidentally creating more tire wear at Bristol
