Stewart probably won't test Goodyear tires again
By Bob Pockrass - Associate Editor
Friday, March 14, 2008
David Griffin / NASCAR Scene
BRISTOL, Tenn. – In case there was any question about it, Tony Stewart likely won’t be invited back to a Goodyear tire test anytime soon.
But officials say that isn’t a result of his vocal criticism of the company for the tire it brought last week to Atlanta Motor Speedway.
Instead, Goodyear officials say they were not happy with Stewart's participation in a tire test at Las Vegas last December.
“Tony was invited to the Las Vegas tire test in December because he was very vocal about his displeasure with the Las Vegas race track and our tire recommendation previously,” Greg Stucker, Goodyear director of race tire sales, said Friday morning at Bristol Motor Speedway. “We said, ‘Hey, we understand that, so we want you to be involved in this test.’
“He was there, but I would say he probably really wasn’t involved. He wasn’t into it … If he’s not going to be more constructive than he has been recently or was at that test, no, he won’t get another test. We look for people that want to be engaged, that provide us with feedback, to be there to do what we need.”
Stewart was joined by Jeff Burton, Kasey Kahne and Matt Kenseth at the Vegas test last year.
“Tony made it very clear that he would have [rather] been someplace else and he really wasn’t very cooperative as far as giving us feedback,” Stucker said.
Stewart admits that he wasn’t happy to be at a tire test in December when he’d just finished a grueling season and a postseason celebration in New York.
“I didn’t want to be there,” he said Friday at Atlanta Motor Speedway. “It was December. We had a long year. That’s the facts of it. I didn’t want to be in Vegas. I had to go out the day before, and we stayed two days to tire-test. It was clear after the banquet. It was into our holiday season. “That was three days I would have rather spent with my friends and family that I don’t get a chance to see enough anyway. I actually had something else planned that I wanted to go do and had to cancel it because of the test.
Stewart admits that he’s not a big fan of participating in a tire test, anyway. Asked if it wasn’t his job to give his best effort in that situation, he responded, “I don’t work for Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co.”
He also doesn’t enjoy the monotony of tire testing in general – especially since he doesn’t believe that his input matters.
“I don’t like tire testing anyway,” he said. “It’s more days out of our schedule. There’s a reason that they have to do it, obviously, but the drivers, the teams don’t really get anything for doing it other than taking two days out of their schedule, and we can give them all the feedback that we want, but very rarely – and Dale [Earnhardt] Jr. said the same thing last week in the media center, if you’ll remember and go back to your notes – there is very few times that we give them our input and they actually bring back what we recommend, so it makes it frustrating to want to go try to help a company that doesn’t take the input that you give them anyway and listen to what you have to say.”
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