Goodyear confirms tire blistering in Bud Shootout
Quote selected text Published February 11th, 2008 in NASCAR News
Goodyear Tire and NASCAR officials confirmed there was tire blistering during Saturday night’s Budweiser Shootout, but assured competitors the problem is correctable.
“We saw some signs, up and down pit road, of excessive heat on the right front and right rear (tires) and some blistering,” Goodyear’s Rick Heinrich said Sunday before Daytona 500 qualifying at Daytona International Speedway.
David Gilliland, driving the No. 38 Ford, spun and hit the wall late in the Shootout because of tire blistering. Other accidents were the result of mechanical issues or contact between cars, according to Goodyear engineers.
The tire problem, said Sprint Cup Series director John Darby, was a “worse-case scenario” as far as racing conditions for the 70-lap sprint race, won by Dale Earnhardt Jr.
Darby said Saturday night produced optimum speed conditions. The more speed, the more heat builds in the Goodyear racing tires.
“It was nice, cool air, night time racing, maximum grip in the racetrack, all those things,” Darby said.
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Of course there’s tire problems… Some things never change! Too bad NASCAR’s cronyism will keep any other tire manufacturers from coming in and creating some competition.
yeah. allow hoosier, bridgestone and bf goodrich too!
No way! Keep only one tire manufacturer. Look what happened in F1 when they had two of them. One is going to be better and screw up the races.
Actually you can blame NASCAR for them blistered tires and not Goodyear. NASCAR dictates the tire compounds to produce more pitstops and of course with a softer compound you get more heat making them blister. So even if you had more tire manufacturers involved you would still have the same problem.
If you had more manufacturers, they wouldn’t be able to enforce tire compounds as much. They could test for hardness at ambient temp, and maybe even at running temps… but that doesn’t guarantee anything about grip. Tire companies could do a lot of tricky things to make the tires harder or softer.
Competition is good. I’ll bet you wouldn’t hear half of the complaints you hear now if they actually had decent tires to run on. Goodyear supplies them with hockey-pucks for tires because there is no competition. They should be pushing tire development, not leaving it at a stand-still.