Nationwide Series officials prepare for possibility of rain at Montreal

By Lee Montgomery - Associate Editor

Saturday, August 02, 2008

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MONTREAL – With a chance of rain Saturday at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, NASCAR officials were plotting strategy on how to handle the possibility of a wet NAPA Auto Parts 200 Nationwide Series race.

Goodyear has rain tires available, but that is clearly a final option. Nationwide Series Director Joe Balash said NASCAR would dictate when teams would put rain tires on before or during the race.

"Our first effort would be to run in the dry, if possible," Balash said. "We have the cars prepared for rain. We have our rain tires that are available to us. We have the wiper motors, the lights, the blowers, the teams can put Rain-X on, so the teams are prepared to run in the event of rain.

"If we would have a situation where rain would occur, where we would deem it necessary to go to the rain option, we would probably put a caution out – maybe even call it a red flag – bring the teams onto pit road, make the changeover and then put them back on the race course."

Marcos Ambrose welcomes the wet weather, given his experience driving in the rain in the Australian V8 Supercar Series.

“Yeah, bring it on,” Ambrose said. “We’ll run rain or shine. I really feel like the race is going to be long. There’s going to be a lot of cautions. The weather is going to be unpredictable. It’s going to create a lot of change in the outcome of the race, I’m sure.”

Canadian Patrick Carpentier, who also has experience racing in the rain, said the key to driving in the rain is simply staying on the track.

“If it’s raining, and you’re still on track at the end of the race, you’ve got a pretty good chance to win this thing,” Carpentier said.

But a wet-weather race would be “fun,” he said.

“If it rains, it’s going to be hard to tell what’s going to happen,” Carpentier said. “It’s going to be a very difficult race, but very exciting
for the crowd. So if it rains, don’t stay home. Come, and you’ll have a good show.”

Balash said the procedure from switching from rain to dry tires during the race is still a work in progress.

“That procedure is something we want to get a lot of input on before we make that decision,” Balash said. “We're on such a big race track where it could potentially be raining at one end of the track and not at the other. So we're going to look at all the elements before we make a decision on how we come back to a tire changeover."

Another issue are the tires themselves. NASCAR hasn’t used rain tires before, and Ambrose wondered about their capabilities.

“I’m not sure if the weather tires would have the most grip I’ve ever seen,” Ambrose said. “I saw them in Mexico and they looked a little purple."

But Balash said Goodyear has eliminated some of its older rain tires out of their stockpile.

"We have a very high level of confidence in the product that we're bringing to the race track," Balash said. "We wouldn’t bring anything to the race track that we didn’t have a high level of confidence in. We've cycled out some older date codes that have been part of the product offering. We've got very good stuff, ready to go."