Stewart, others question Goodyear's tire choice
HAMPTON, Ga. – Tony Stewart finished second behind Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Kyle Busch in Sunday’s Kobalt Tools 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway. But the performance of Goodyear’s tires wiped away any smile that may have been on Stewart’s face.
Stewart, long a Goodyear critic, lashed out again at the tire manufacturer after the race.
“I’ve been racing for 28 years and been part of a lot of different professional series and never seen a quality of racing tire like I’ve seen this weekend,” Stewart said. “If Goodyear thinks that was their best effort today, I’m really disappointed.
“I ran second, but I wouldn’t re-run this race for any amount of money in the world. It was just that bad. We’re pleading with Goodyear, ‘Do something about this. Make it better.’”
Other drivers voiced the opinion that the tire was too hard for the surface of the 1.54-mile track, but Goodyear Marketing Manager for Motorsports Justin Fantozzi asserted that his company’s main task is to bring the safest tire possible to each track.
“We’re tremendously proud of the wear rates we saw here,” Fantozzi said after Stewart made his postrace comments. “We have a defined development process for this particular tire. We started in August with the development test here in Atlanta. From those wear rates and those data sets, we made a recommendation for the open house test [in October].
“That was a different tire than we actually raced on here in October. Based on those wear rates not being acceptable, in our opinion, we had another development test here in December and made that recommendation for here.”
But though the wear rates may have been good for Goodyear, it made racing at Atlanta nearly an impossible task, drivers said.
“We couldn’t run side-by-side,” third-place finisher Dale Earnhardt Jr. said. “We’d wreck. We’d had to let everybody go by. Every time you’d got beside a guy, you’re just like, ‘Take it.’”
No matter how much practice time his Hendrick Motorsports team had, Earnhardt Jr. said they weren’t going to get NASCAR’s new model car hooked up to the tire. It was “way too hard,” he said.
“I’m glad we’re past it,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “Hopefully there was a good lesson learned. Goodyear doesn’t like to hear people bashing them tires, and I don’t like doing it. But I ain’t going to sit here and put up with this. And I don’t think any of the other drivers are going to do it.”
Stewart acknowledged that Goodyear does need to provide a safe tire, “but at the same time, you’ve got to provide a product that is competitive and current.”
“I guess I can’t say it’s surprising because they got run out of Formula One, CART, the IRL, they got run out of World of Outlaws Sprint Cars, they got run out of USAC’s divisions because they couldn’t keep up and couldn’t make a quality product,” Stewart said. “This weekend shows their true colors and what they’re about.”
Stewart said Goodyear hasn’t been able to keep up with the technology that’s in NASCAR now and that there aren’t “enough quality people” at Goodyear to make a good tire for NASCAR.
Fantozzi said he didn’t want to get into a “one-on-one” battle with Stewart, but stood by the tire decision made by Goodyear’s engineers.
Stewart asserted that the tire maker told teams a “week before we come to Atlanta” that there will be a new tire for the race, giving teams tire data at that time, too. Fantozzi denied that.
“That data was available over a month ago,” Fantozzi said. “We have been fielding technical questions since Daytona.”
While Stewart and Earnhardt Jr. hoped Goodyear would bring a different tire for the October race at Atlanta, Fantozzi said the company would stick to its usual approach.
“We’ll do the same exact thing we do every race,” Fantozzi said. “We’ll have that postrace data analysis meeting. We now have a new set of data. We’ll go back to Akron and sit down with the engineers and go through the process again and see where that leads us for the fall race.”
