The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company Wednesday completed a “continuation test” at Darlington Raceway with drivers #16-Greg Biffle, #24-Jeff Gordon and #12-Ryan Newman. An initial test with the same drivers earlier this month got Goodyear half-way to its goal of finding the right tire combination for the May 10 race at the legendary track.

Goodyear engineers and the three teams held an original tire test at Darlington on March 10-11. They struck on the correct right-side tire, though they were not completely satisfied with the left-side codes they tested. Thus, Goodyear brought back the same three teams — so as to take advantage of their baseline notes — to hone in on that correct left-side.

“Goodyear did a great job with the tire that they brought back,” said Greg Biffle. “The track still has quite a bit of speed. The ’softer’ left-side tire had us a little faster than we wanted to go, but the ‘tougher’ left-side was real driveable. We were all happy with it.” A complete track repaving job was recently completed at Darlington, changing what had traditionally been one of the NASCAR circuits most abrasive racing surfaces. The result is a smooth, fast race track.

“The track seems to be, as all dark, repaved tracks are, very sensitive to temperature. The hotter it is, the less grip there is,” explained Rick Campbell, Goodyear’s team leader for NASCAR Racing. “The Darlington race will be run primarily in the evening and this tire is intended to perform on a cool race track where grip will be a little better. This is the right tire for an evening race at Darlington and based on the feedback we received from all three drivers in attendance, they agreed with that.”