Goodyear tires played a big role on Saturday night at the Bristol Motor Speedway. A new, softer right-side tire was brought to the track in the hopes that it would wear off quickly and give drivers and teams better control of the race outcome, since they would be focused on making the allotted set of tires last. This mission was accomplished successfully, but it didn’t leave everyone happy.
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Team Penske driver Ryan Blaney spoke to the press after finishing the race in fourth place and said that they needed tires on which the rubber wears out instead of having ones that blow out after every 40 laps. He added, “There’s an in-between. Got to keep working on it. That’s really all you can do. It’s tough. My gosh, I don’t envy their job of trying to figure that out. Just try to do the best job they can.”
“They’ve done a good job so far of getting softer and softer at other places, and it’s worked. Here’s just a little bit of a different animal that they got to keep working with. So, hopefully we get a little bit of a kind of an in-between.” The night race featured 36 lead changes, the third most of all-time in Bristol, and also featured 14 cautions, which is the most since 2020
RFK Racing co-owner and driver, Brad Keselowski, declared, “The tire worked.” Interestingly, during Friday’s practice sessions, drivers had been able to drive over 60 laps with the temperature at 80 degrees. On Saturday night, the heat dropped to 69 degrees, and the track became an optimal surface for the tires to degrade better. It was highly reminiscent of the situation in the March 2024 race at Bristol.
Keselowski’s observation of the tire wear
Keselowski finished the race as the runner-up. He told the press, “The temperature dropped to the threshold, and we got a tire-wear race. It’s so freaking … I don’t know. There are some scientists somewhere that could have a big study on this one – how, like, a five-degree swing of track temp changes it so dramatically.” He noted that the track was similar to what it had been back in 1995.
The suits from Goodyear agreed with his observations. The drop in temperature had the compound behaving exactly as it should and very much like the March 2024 race. Christopher Bell was yet another driver who thought on the same line. “Honestly, I thought it was identical. It was the exact same,” he quipped after finishing in 10th place.
If anything is true now, it is that the high tire wear tests man and machine alike. Hopefully, such showings will become more frequent on short tracks in the future.
