Goodyear has a mystery to unfurl.
No one immediately understood why the tires reacted to Bristol Motor Speedway the way they did over the weekend for the Food City 500. There are multiple theories, of course, but no one will know for sure until tire samples are taken back to the manufacturing plant in Akron, Ohio for a chemical analysis.
These were, by intent, the same compounds used in September for the Bristol Night Race but there were several variables that could have contributed to the extreme tire wear that transpired on Sunday afternoon.
The degradation forced teams to drastically slow their pace to make tires last as close to possible to an entire fuel run. It created a tremendous amount of action and anxiety in equal parts, as the rubber periodically gave up life and then failed altogether somewhere after 40 laps even with drivers backing their pace up.
The tires were designed last year to generate falloff and produced a pretty compelling race in September but Goodyear director of racing Greg Stucker conceded that Sunday was too much.
“I would agree [that] tire wear is always the goal,” said Stucker during a visit to the media center during the final stage of the race. “That’s what people wanted to see. It creates comers and goers and who manages tires the best. But we thought we were in a really good spot last year with the tire as we raced it in the fall and something is different now. So this is too drastic.
“We tested here last year with the intent to come up with a tire package that generated more tire wear — that was the request from NASCAR and the teams. We feel like we had a very successful test. We feel like we had a very successful race in the fall of last year because we did exactly that.
“We ran a full fuel stop [and] definitely saw wear, but we thought it was spot on. So now we’re trying to understand what’s different — why is the racetrack behaving differently this weekend than what it did a year ago?”
The variables were cooler temperatures for the first spring race at the track in three years and the application of a resin instead of PJ1 TrackBite as the traction compound of choice. For whatever reason, the tire did not lay down rubber into the track and it eroded quickly as a result.
But even during practice, no one saw coming what would happen on Sunday, as explained by Hendrick Motorsports crew chief for Kyle Larson, Cliff Daniels.
“Anytime you come to Bristol and unload on a green track in practice the way you do, there’s always high right side wear and you come to expect that,” Daniels said. “Your left sides look okay in practice and your right sides look a little worse than you are comfortable with.”
That’s because the right sides haven’t started to lay down rubber into the track yet and wear decreases once that rubber works itself into the surface.
“All of that felt normal Bristol (on Saturday) but what was strange was the handling comments as the resin was good but once it worked off as practice went, that was different so we didn’t know what to expect or how it would react (Sunday). There was no one who saw that coming.”
That was echoed by race winning crew chief Chris Gabehart too.
“I think a lot of us thought maybe 80, 100 (laps) in, this place would rubber in and get a little more familiar,” he said. “But it did not.”
The rubber, again, just didn’t lay down and that is what Stucker struggled to wrap his head around on Sunday.
“It’s the same [race] package. It’s the same tire combination,” Stucker said. “Obviously, the difference is resin was placed on the lower groove instead of the PJ1. Yet I still think the racetrack should be taking rubber as it did last year. It took rubber immediately during that race.
“It’s still a bit of an unknown as far as why it’s not behaving the same — that being the racetrack. But that’s kind of what we know now. Obviously, everybody is kind of in the same boat but some guys are able to manage through it a little bit better than others. It’s still a tough situation, and we’re going to have to try and understand exactly what’s happening, what’s different, and adjust from there.”
It’s not uncommon for tires to not lay rubber down on concrete surfaces when it’s cold. That’s been the case at Martinsville and Dover in the past.
Race winner Denny Hamlin joked all weekend that someone ‘pee-peed’ in the formula at Akron. It was kind of a joke but also kind of serious. He hopes, once Goodyear runs an analysis and figures out what happened, that the manufacturer learns from it because it was actually a positive direction for the sport.
He reiterated that on Monday during an episode of his Actions Detrimental podcast.
“They told me at the Texas tire test, ‘there’s something we can put in it that can accelerate the tire wear’
“Somebody knocked over that bottle into the mixture. But you got to get somebody there to admit, or maybe it was just an accident, I don’t know. But we need to find out what’s different from that tire in the fall to that tire today.”
Hamlin was then notified that the extra set of tires that were released to teams in the second half of the race on Sunday was actually from the previous race in September and that only served to befuddle Hamlin more.
On one hand, those tires did last longer but that was probably set-up more than anything else, but maybe it was the compound.
But it also comes back to how much cooler it was compared to September.
“If that is the case then it’s a track temperature issue,” Hamlin said. “I did see that the outside temperature of the last two Bristol races was 70 degrees because they were all Night Races,” and that these tires just don’t lay down rubber unless it is at least 60 degrees.
The industry awaits answers.
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.