At Bristol, NASCAR’s ongoing short-track tire conundrum takes another turn

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BRISTOL, Tenn. — When drivers began reporting issues with their tires during Saturday’s practice session, the feeling of déjà vu swept across the NASCAR garage. Just as it did last spring, Bristol Motor Speedway’s concrete surface was chewing up tires unlike any other track on the NASCAR calendar, seemingly set to turn Sunday’s Cup Series race into another high-tire-wear affair, in which any driver who ran too hard would be severely punished.

On Sunday, the sense of “here we go again” was a popular sentiment in the garage, even though the ambient temperature was 15 degrees warmer, the sun was out (after it was cold and dreary on Saturday), and NASCAR had treated Bristol’s surface with PJ1 Trackbite traction compound.

Up and down pit road, many crew chiefs anticipated a race where tire conservation would be the primary difference between winning and losing. They saw what transpired Saturday and had spent the time since then strategizing accordingly. So too had NASCAR and Goodyear, which allotted teams an extra set of tires to better manage the 500-lap race around the half-mile track.

All the hand-wringing proved for naught.

This became obvious on Lap 50, the unofficial marker for when tires started to severely wear to the inner cords during practice (a similar timeframe as last spring), when no drivers reported any issues. Nor did any issues emerge for the remainder of the race. Teams discovered they could go 125-plus laps on a set of tires.

The result was a rather staid race by Bristol standards — not the typical hard-racing, fender-rubbing, finger-pointing action that has made the short track one of the most popular and iconic on NASCAR’s schedule.

Kyle Larson dominated by leading 411 laps, and the racing throughout the field left many drivers struggling to pass and lamenting anytime they found themselves mired in traffic. There was also just a single caution for an on-track incident.

“Overall, it was just a long day having to come from the back. It didn’t seem like many people could pass,” said William Byron, who finished sixth after starting 26th.

A crew member works on a tire during Sunday’s race at Bristol Motor Speedway, where a repeat of last year’s high-tire-wear race never materialized. (Jared C. Tilton / Getty Images)

In successive years, Bristol’s spring race produced two wildly different types of events, prompting the question: Which version should NASCAR strive for here?

On one side, some contend what happened Sunday is racing in its purest sense. A great driver in Larson, surrounded by an exceptional Hendrick Motorsports tea,m put an old-school stomping on the field. As one team member for a rival organization noted, this is what happens when a race unfolds “naturally and without gimmicks” to gin up the excitement. On Sunday, the best driver and team won.

“Today, you had lanes across the entire racing surface, you had guys slipping around,” said Cliff Daniels, Larson’s crew chief. “Go look at the right side of our car. It’s destroyed from getting through traffic and touching guys and fenders. We have doughnuts on the side of the car.

“… To me today’s race, when the top two cars are within a second apart, navigating through traffic and every single lane that was available and bouncing off of (lapped) cars, I know we want cautions and yellows for excitement, but from a racing purist standpoint, today’s race was a heck of a race because Denny (Hamlin, who finished second) was coming, he put pressure on us. We knew it. We had to take chances. Man, that just presents such a good race from our seat.”

What Daniels observed is the dirty secret about Bristol, which has produced numerous highlights over the years but also some races where a driver leads nearly every lap and little happens throughout the field. What many people identify with Bristol is often a byproduct of passing being so difficult — it compels drivers to use their front bumpers to wedge someone out of the way, thereby creating flared tempers.

Of course, the comeback is that this is what short-track racing is supposed to be. Anger and animosity are why fans clamor for the addition of short tracks on the schedule, and the backbone to why Bristol was once one of the hottest tickets in sports with a streak of selling out 55 consecutive races.

Many would like NASCAR to solve the riddle that is its Next Gen car — which requires parts be ordered from single-source suppliers, leaving teams with small margins to find performance gains — or for Goodyear to continue pushing toward building an even softer tire compound that wears regardless of the temperature.

Don’t count on sweeping changes to the Next Gen. Forcing teams to pay for new parts and pieces, let alone the development of a whole new car, is not an expense teams are prepared to underwrite. This leaves the tires as the sensible option as to how to best improve racing at Bristol, and other short tracks.

From what happened at Bristol last spring to the fall playoff race at the half-mile Martinsville Speedway, Goodyear has shown it can produce a tire that wears, thereby giving drivers more control in managing a race and giving fans greater excitement.

But there is a limit to how far Goodyear should push it. Few would argue that the tire wear shown last spring and again on Saturday was within reason. Tires cording after only 50 laps is untenable, effectively forcing drivers to throttle back and run tight against the bottom, further limiting passing.

“Obviously I’m going to be biased to this, I just think it’s more fun (the way it was Sunday),” Larson said. “We’re still out there managing our runs.

“Last year was very excessive. I mean, we were running maybe 50 percent throughout a run. That was too much. But then today, we’re much closer to 100 percent every lap, but somewhere between 85 percent to 90 percent still trying to manage everything.

Ideally, NASCAR can find a sweet spot. Make tire wear matter more, just not to the over-the-top levels seen previously.

“I am a little disappointed in today with the tire, I’ll be honest,” Hendrick Motorsports vice chairman Jeff Gordon said. “There was no fall-off and no wear. …

“But at the same time, I don’t like what happened last year either. I want to say this: Goodyear has a tough job. I think this car, we have a heavy car. Just stock cars in general. We have these high-bank tracks, heavy loads, abrasive surfaces. There’s just a lot of things that are very difficult for them to do the things that they do to make a tire that’s durable and performs well. To ask for them on top of that to have a tire that falls off and wears but doesn’t wear too much, that’s a tall task.”

(Top photo of a stack of Goodyear tires during Sunday’s race at Bristol Motor Speedway: Jared C. Tilton / Getty Images)

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