NASCAR VP dismisses idea of Goodyear tire testing team
By Bob Pockrass - Associate Editor
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Jim Fluharty / NASCAR Scene
BRISTOL, Tenn. – NASCAR Vice President Robin Pemberton and a Goodyear official dismissed the idea of a dedicated tire testing team Friday, a week after widespread complaints over Goodyear’s choice for a tire coming out of the Atlanta race weekend.
Goodyear chose the tire after two tests at Atlanta Motor Speedway. During the first test, in late October, the tires wore out before the end of a fuel run. Goodyear returned in December with Petty Enterprises’ Bobby Labonte. Kevin Harvick Inc.’s Ron Hornaday tested in a truck at the same time.
Following that test, Goodyear officials felt they had reached a satisfactory balance of a tire that wouldn’t wear out during a tire run and
would have adequate grip.
However, during last weekend's Kobalt 500, the grip was lacking, prompting several complaints from drivers.
Could a dedicated test team and driver have helped the situation?
“You’ve got to have the best drivers and teams you can test tires,” Pemberton said. “You can’t have guys that don’t stand on the gas
test tires. You can’t have retired guys test tires because they’re not going to get the most out of it.
“People who haven’t been tire testing or haven’t raced for a living can over-simplify it and say, ‘Just go get a test team and get a guy off a different series and test.’ There’s a reason they’re not in this level. You want guys on this level that know what they need.”
Goodyear has attempted to have a test team for other racing series.
“We don’t feel that is the best way to do it,” Goodyear Director of Race Tire Sales Greg Stucker said Friday. “The guys that are out here running every week are the closest to the cars, they’re closest to the engines, they’re close to the tires, they’re close to the race tracks – they’re the guys that could give us the most help, the most feedback.
“They’re also the guys that are going to be in race conditions. That is the sort of data that you want to gather. That’s the sort of information you want. If you have somebody that does nothing but testing, you can do some fundamental things, but you can’t do what we eventually want to do and that is to eventually find the right combination.”
Stucker said Goodyear left Atlanta in December believing officials had found an adequate tire.
“We ... walk out of there thinking, ‘We have a pretty good package here. This is going to be reasonable, we think we’ll be good for the stop and we’ll be OK,’ ” Stucker said. “You’re not going to know for sure until you get to the race weekend and you’ve got 43 Cup guys or 43 Nationwide guys out there all at once in race trim, in race conditions, trying to pass one another.
“We can test a lot, but the ultimate evaluation, the ultimate test is certainly going to be the race event.”
When Goodyear engineers left Darlington Raceway earlier this week, they had a different feeling about their situation than they did at Atlanta. As a result, Goodyear has scheduled a second Darlington test later this month to get ready for the May 10 race.
“We think we’re very, very close,” Stucker said. “But we have time, we’re going to turn tires around and we’re going to go back again in two weeks and finish up that test.
“As much as we can, as much as we need to, we will do that. Darlington is a perfect example. We’re not quite there yet. We’ve got time. We’re going to go back and we feel like we could make it a little bit better because we didn’t walk out of there as comfortable as we walked out of Atlanta at the test, so we just want to go back and fine-tune it.”
Stucker said typically Goodyear would need a couple of months to get enough tires ready for a race but can do it much quicker if there was something “really, really amiss.”
He also said the company is not conservative – when determining the best tires for a particular track – for public relations reasons, which has been one of the accusations lobbed its way.
“I don’t think you ever want to see anybody have a tire problem,” Stucker said. “The reason we are conservative is to make sure that we don’t have that. We’ve always demonstrated, if we have an issue, our responsibility is to try to recognize it and we try to address it.
“Yes, we are going to be conservative, but the reason is because we have to make sure that conservatism provides a tire that is good across the board – so if a guy does miss a setup, it’s not going to result in a tire problem that results in an accident, a tire failure, or whatever the case may be. We’re willing to take our licks with anybody, but we still have to provide a tire for everybody out there.”
Recent Comments: