Rodney Childers loves the option tire so much that he doesn’t even want it to be an option.
The crew chief of the Stewart-Haas Racing No. 4 team wants them to make it the standard tire at the next familiar NASCAR Cup Series short track race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway on June 23. Basically, he wants to replicate what happened at Bristol at every short track moving forward.
“They need to run these everywhere and be done with it,” Childers said. “They would be crazy to not run these at Loudon. If it turns into a shit show, it turns into a shit show. That’s the best thing we’ve put on in a long time.
“With this being a repave, a few of them blistered but I don’t think they ever would on an older surface. They’ll wear but they won’t blister.
“The whole complexity of the track changed once we put the (option tires) on. It was one groove at first and then enough guys took the reds, it went three wide in 20 laps. There is a lot for Goodyear and NASCAR to be proud of, and the race track too, for how they paved this track.”
Cliff Daniels, crew chief for Kyle Larson and the Hendrick Motorsports No. 5, isn’t opposed to that idea, conceptually.
“I think it could be viable,” Daniels said. “I know there were some guys that ran on the (options) and got some blisters. As an industry, you’ll get different opinions about whether or not we want to take that risk or not.
“If you took it to Loudon, I know it can run long so if you run them at Loudon for 70 laps, will they blister and will you have to pit anyway? I’m okay with that, because it opens up strategy but not everyone might feel that way.
“I don’t disagree with Rodney because having the ability to play strategy with tires, and having the tires mean something – if you run them too hard, that’s bad, bolt on fresh ones is good because they’re fast and sticky, and grippy and all the things, and that opens up a lot of different options and I’m always in favor of that.”
Crew chief for Kyle Busch and the Richard Childress Racing No. 8 still has a lot of questions himself about what Sunday night will look like.
“Starting on them for the All-Star Race, we don’t get a planned caution until Lap 100 so it’s going to be interesting to be how well they hold on,” Burnett said. “They seem to have a decent amount of falloff. We just have to see if they can live.”
The crossover point is expected to come between 13-20 laps — meaning the point where the option tires are no longer as fast as the primary compound.
Drew Blickensderfer, crew chief of the Stewart-Haas Racing No. 10 and Noah Gragson, said the option tire is going to make the prime tire stints better due to how it widens out the track.
“It made the track wide and that’s what made practice so much fun,” Blickensderfer said. “Watching the Truck race today, it seemed like the track even got wide just one their one compound. I think the track is going to get wide and it’s going to be the most interesting short track repave we’ve ever seen.”
He also thinks there will be strategic divergence at some point.
“If you’re up front, you’ll want the primes, save the option for later in the race,” he said. “If you don’t have track position, you’re going to have to get it somehow. So I think you’ll see at some point, the front of the field on the primes and the back on the options and they’ll flip flop based on what you need and what you have already used up.”
Daniels says it’s all still a mystery because no one knows how much life that option tire will have.
“It’s really hard to say because the track went through a transition from the start of practice to the end of practice,” Daniels said. “There is some falloff to the (options) and the (primes) can hang on a bit longer as you would expect, right, harder compound lasts longer and the softer compound goes away faster.
“I don’t know that anyone has an idea of what lap that crossover point is, how much time you’re giving up on either side of the crossover, and there’s still a lot to be learned today and tonight.
“It will be interesting to see how it plays out. I do think we’ll see some guys save their stuff on softer tires and make it live longer. Is that better than putting on the harder tire and just going hard the whole race? That’s what we have yet to learn.”
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.