It might be a moot point with the forecasted temperature on Sunday for the NASCAR Cup Series race at Bristol, but Goodyear has created a tire that intends to lay down rubber no matter what, even if temperatures are cold.
Two of the past four races at The Last Great Coliseum have featured extreme tire wear due to the track surface failing to take rubber. As a result, it just shredded tires and drivers had to take extreme care to make tires last beyond 40 laps.
That’s one end of the spectrum, and the other has been a track that takes rubber, but because it’s rubber on rubber through the concrete pores, the other two races did not feature a lot of fall off and were quite procedural.
Justin Fantozzi, Goodyear’s Director of Racing for the Americas, appeared on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio on Tuesday morning and said the manufacturer has spent much of the past year trying to eliminate those two extremes.
“You know, we always start with the previous race, and we look back over the last couple
for Bristol, and we know that the chaos needs to be there,” Fantozzi said. “We know the excitement needs to be there. We just need to turn the foolishness down just a little bit. And the real crux with Bristol has been the change between the weather on Saturday and Sunday.
“So, we wanted to take some of that temperature sensitivity out. We tested in November - it was quite cold, it was in the 40s when we got there in the morning. We wanted to make sure we could put rubber down in the cold. That way if we had a spring where it was cold, or in the fall at night if it was cold, we had that covered. So that was objective number one.
“I feel very confident in what the engineers have prescribed for the event this weekend, taking care of that. We repeated that a couple weeks ago with the March OEM wheel force test. So, we’re rocking ready to go for this weekend.”
Fantozzi was also asked how Goodyear went about creating a tire that would lay down rubber even in the cold.
“So the big thing is the concrete,” Fantozzi said. “We know that as the concrete warms and cools, it has different functions relative to grip. So how it’s going to grab and hold on … the surface is going to grab and hold on, and that grip factor changes as you have differences in temperature.
“It’s no different than chewing bubble gum. If your mouth is smoking hot, you know that the bubble gum is going to act differently than when you’re trying to chew it when it’s cold. So, we took that into account. We’ve done it at other racetracks. When we look back at repaves, if we look at Kansas, we would test at night at Kansas because it was just too hot during the day. You want to make sure that you have that temperature in a window that you feel that you’re going to race at. We made sure that when we went back to Bristol in November, we did it in the morning when it was quite cold, to make sure that we take care of business.”
