NASCAR Cup Series crew chiefs found out about the wide application of PJ1 to the bottom groove of Bristol Motor Speedway on race day afternoon the same way as most everyone else in the industry in the form of a memo.
“Following a discussion with drivers, Goodyear and the race track, NASCAR will apply approximately two feet of PJ1 to the bottom of the racing surface and clean the top groove of excess rubber.”
Drew Blickensdefer, crew chief of the Stewart-Haas Racing No. 10 team, was certainly caught off guard by it.
“Yeah, no idea on the crew chief side,” Blickensderfer said. “It’s frustrating because you work a month leading up into this race, trying to prepare for what you had in the spring to make our cars good, then we had 45 minutes of practice, we made the guess overnight that it was going to be a top dominant race, just to find out at 1 o’clock that they’re going to spray PJ1 and scrape the rubber off the top.
“You don’t know what to expect now so it’s frustrating to do it this way at our level, especially with it being a (playoff) cutoff race.”
Speaking of it being a cutoff race, RFK Racing No. 6 crew chief Matt McCall is trying to engineer Brad Keselowski into the second round of the playoffs, and now the race is taking place on a different ball field of sorts.
“There was no meeting on our end,” McCall said. “I just got the email saying they’re putting down up to two feet of PJ1 on the bottom and that’s all we knew.”
It forced every crew chief to go into overdrive mode when the garage opened at 3:30 ET on Saturday. Ultimately, everyone agrees that it’s the same for everyone but it is a challenge to overcome over 500 laps.
“It’s going to change the race for sure,” McCall said, “but we don’t know the magnitude, right? We don’t entirely know what the tire wear is going to be. Having the Xfinity and ARCA cars here this week changed that from March.
“But (the PJ1) is going to wear off to a degree, right, and so even if the first part of the race is bottom heavy, it’s going to drift back up towards the top because it always does.”
Rodney Childers of Stewart-Haas also said he found out really last minute but also understands the decision as it will open up a passing lane on the bottom for at least half the race, improving the racing product for one of NASCAR’s most important races.
“I mean, it was a guess coming here, you know, doing the things that we did in practice and made a calculated decision based on that and now the track might be completely different today with the PJ1. But it’s the same for everyone.
“The one thing we have to remember, and we talk about this all the time, is we have to put on a good show for the fans. If we don’t do that, we’re not filling these seats, so hopefully this puts on a good show for fans tonight.”
Mike Kelley of JTG Daugherty Racing is frustrated too but again, this is the same for everybody.
“To wake up this morning or just find out literally 15 minutes ago that they’ve changed their minds talking to a few drivers again, it’s interesting for all of us,” Kelley said. “I don’t know what to really say about it. I know what I want to say but we’re just going to sit down and figure out a new plan.
“I just got off the phone with Ricky (Stenhouse, driver) and now we’re going to sit down with the engineers and figure out the best plan of attack and try to guess better than the rest of them.”
And really, that’s what this entire weekend has been. There was an expectation entering the weekend that NASCAR and Goodyear were going to successfully replicate the extreme tire wear race that took place in March.
Despite bringing what Goodyear says is the same tire on the same resin formula, that hasn’t happened and based on practice, that wasn’t going to happen.
There was a test in July and the same thing happened!
Richard Childress Racing interim competition director Keith Rodden says ‘talk to Goodyear.’
“There has to be something they can trace, the base materials that go into the tires,” Rodden said. “It was really hot at the test in July and they had the same issues. Then they put down some PJ1 and it got more life out of the tires.
“To come here this weekend and have no issues, it’s a total mystery.”
Blickensderfer can’t make sense of it.
“The tire tests they did here with 14 car, it was just like March, you know,” Blickensderfer said. “50 laps, maybe before you had cords on both right sides so we came here, expecting that and lo and behold, we had 45 minutes practice and for 40 minutes of it, people were running the top and we ran 70 straight laps with no issues.
“We could go 120 laps with no issues. Not sure what is completely different, but it’s not what I think everybody expected.”
Childers echoed that sentiment.
“I don’t know if they changed the tiniest little thing in the tire and didn’t tell us but that’s sometimes how it works.”
Ultimately, Kelley said March is going to go down as one of NASCAR’s greatest mysteries.
“That spring race is going to go down as one of the great asterisks,” Kelley said. “It’s such an oddity. They tell us the tires are the same and I guess, if they tell me that enough, I’ll start to believe them. I’m not saying I don’t but there just had to be something different that night.
“They tested it in cold weather and got the same thing. They tested it in hot weather and got the same thing. They wore tires out big time in the summer test. We live in this databased world and we all spend a lot of money on really smart people and so many of them have no idea how to explain what happened that night.
“But I really, drivers and teams, all of us, we really enjoyed that race because it put it all on our hands. And this weekend, we built cars expecting that kind of race, went a little conservative with our builds expecting a tire management race with springs and bars, camber set-up, and now we all probably left a lot on the table from where we loaded up earlier this week.”