Senior competition leadership at NASCAR did not get the Bristol Night Race they expected on Saturday night.
Both the sanctioning body and its tire supplier, Goodyear, worked to replicate what happened at the Tennessee half-mile in March, a race that featured tremendous tire wear, but that never materialized. In March, the race began with the risk of tire failure before 30 laps into a run but drivers and crew chiefs responded with changes that got that number closer to 70 by the end.
Then there was a test in July, and despite warmer temperatures, produced identical life span in the tires. These were also the same tires used last fall, last spring and the test in July. But the results didn’t match the goal and NASCAR senior vice president of competition Elton Sawyer says his office is working to better understand why.
“We’re baffled, to be perfectly honest,” Sawyer said on Tuesday morning during an appearance on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. “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 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.”
One theory is that it didn’t happen because the spring race featured just a short Truck Series race before the Cup Series main event. This past weekend featured ARCA, Trucks and the Xfinity Series all before the Cup Series race.
A ton of rubber was laid down before the Cup Series even practiced, much less raced.
“There were 1200 … prior to the Cup race, there was 700 or 800 laps of racing already on the facility,” Sawyer said. “The race track was taking rubber, something it didn’t do in the spring, so after watching the races on Thursday and Friday, even though there were cars all over the place, it was apparent the top lane had become very dominant so we met on Saturday morning, and Bristol Motor Speedway, and input from our drivers as well plus Goodyear.
“We all met to discuss ‘where are we are right now’ and what we needed for the race on Saturday and the decision was made that we would apply the PJ1, a product we had applied before. We had put PJ1 on top of the resin before so there was no concern there that those two products wouldn’t be compatible and the goal was to make sure the cars could get to the bottom of the race track, give us two lanes to race on, and we did see that throughout the event. They ran on the bottom, top and middle, so we did have multiple grooves.”
The tire fell off somewhere from four-tenths to seven-tenths by the end of the 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.”
The most prevalent theory is still that the March tires were fundamentally different in a way Goodyear can’t explain because, during that spring race, NASCAR allowed teams to buy more tires from the supplier and those came from the previous fall race.
Those tires reacted tremendously different than those purchased for the spring race.
Ultimately, as crew chiefs concluded over the weekend in a Sportsnaut report, this is likely going to go down as one of NASCAR’s greatest unsolved mysteries.
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.