NASCAR has a short-track problem. The tight and confined layouts that historically put on the category's best racing have struggled since the series switched to the Next Gen car in 2022, and major aerodynamic revisions introduced at Phoenix last week did little to help the cause. That meant excitement was unusually low for Sunday's race at the beloved Bristol Motor Speedway. The excitement came back instantly when serious and fortuitous tire problems emerged mid-race.
Officially, Goodyear is not exactly sure what happened. The response from the brand's director of racing during the race on Sunday suggested that the biggest factor was the track not taking rubber, leaving the racing line relatively green while the outside of corners filled with mountains of shed tire marbles. Goodyear says it brought the same left-side and right-side tire compounds to the track, so the only other obvious variables were track conditions and a different kind of adhesive compound applied to the track's inside groove by NASCAR. That impacted only one of the track's racing lanes, but the middle and outside grooves also did not rubber up the way they had in past races. There is also the possibility of an unknown change in the tires themselves, like a different construction technique or supplier tolerance that may have made the same compound of tire react differently.
Goodyear did not immediately respond to Road & Track's request for comment.
Whatever happened, teams were caught off guard and did not set up their cars for the possibility of extreme tire wear. That meant drivers regularly wore through the entire life of a set of tires during a green flag run, well before any fuel stop was necessary. It also meant that tires were going flat regularly under green.
Those are major, legitimate concerns. Teams are right to be frustrated by a race so different from what they planned to see and drivers like Kyle Larson have a good reason to be uncomfortable with a race that had so many sudden blown tires.
“I’ve never ran a race like that,” Larson said, Autoweek reports. “I hope I never have to run a race like that again. To have to run a race like that every week would not be good, and it’s honestly probably a black eye to Goodyear just with all the rubber that couldn’t get laid down and just wearing through tires and all that.”
From the spectator perspective, though, the racing proved that dramatic tire wear makes for an exceptionally entertaining on-track product. With further refinement for safety and a little more durability, a package built around this sort of tire degradation could produce better, more fun-to-watch racing every week.