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Earnhardt wanted to hear what tire testers Jeff Gordon,
Greg Biffle and
Ryan Newman had to say about the compounds Goodyear was
trying out at
the 1.366-mile speedway for the May 10 Dodge Challenger
500 at NASCAR’s
most venerable -- and most recently repaved --speedway.
Earnhardt’s concern surfaced in the aftermath of
Sunday’s race, where he
finished third. In a postrace news conference, Earnhardt
and race
runner-up Tony Stewart were far more interested in
expressing their
outrage at the hard tire Goodyear brought to Atlanta
than in basking in
the elation of their respective top-five finishes.
“I’m really excited that I didn’t crash,” said Stewart,
who has been
Goodyear’s harshest critic. “That was half the battle in
itself. Been
racing 28 years and been a part of a lot of different
professional
series, and I’ve never seen a quality of racing tire
like I’ve seen this
weekend. ...
“If the rest of the year, if that’s what we’ve got to
look forward to is
weekends like this, there will be a lot of drivers going
into retirement
a lot earlier, because nobody’s going to want to keep
doing this like
this.”
Stewart, admittedly, trades in hyperbole to get his
points across.
Earnhardt typically does not. Yet, as the news
conference progressed,
the level or Earnhardt’s frustration escalated.
“There’s a big difference between complaining and
stating the obvious,”
he said. “You know, it is what it is. It’s not a
complaint. It is what
it is. ... I don’t think, for one, that the race was all
that exciting.
We couldn’t run side-by-side -- we’d wreck, you know.
“They said they’d give us the (tire) data earlier in the
year, around
Daytona or before, but no amount of time would have
prepared you for
that. You weren’t going to hook that tire up. It was way
too hard.”
Goodyear’s stonewall response was as hard as the tires
the company
supplied for the race. Justin Fantozzi, manager of
Goodyear's race tire
sales and marketing, reiterated the same boiler-plate
language he had
told a smaller group of reporters the day before.
“There are 43 drivers and 43 crew chiefs and 30 owners
-- that’s 120
opinions,” Fantozzi said.
When most of the opinions are roughly the same, however,
it’s called a
consensus. On Sunday, it wasn’t just the Cassandra voice
of Tony Stewart
bashing the tire compound. It was a chorus that included
a core group of
the most popular, high profile drivers in the sport.
It was a chorus that deserves the attention of the tire
supplier and the
sanctioning body.
Let’s make one thing clear. NASCAR is under no
obligation to give
drivers a comfortable racecar, and Goodyear is under no
obligation to
produce a comfortable tire. But the car and the tire
have to be
comfortable enough to allow hard, side-by-side racing.
It’s true that extreme conditions can help identify the
best drivers in
the sport. Thirteen drivers finished on the lead lap
Sunday, and the
list reads like a litany of the best wheel men in the
business: Kyle
Busch, Stewart, Earnhardt, Biffle, Gordon, Bowyer,
Harvick, Kenseth,
Vickers, Burton, Kurt Busch, Labonte and Johnson.
The fact that those drivers were able to maintain speed
and keep their
cars between the walls, however, doesn’t necessarily
equate to exciting
racing.
Goodyear’s choice of tires for a particular racetrack is
a safety issue,
but as both Stewart and Earnhardt pointed out, it’s also
a
public-relations issue. The sport’s exclusive tire
supplier through
2012, Goodyear doesn’t want to see the top stars blowing
right fronts
willy-nilly and knocking down the walls.
To think, however, that a consumer will think twice
about buying an
Eagle radial after watching his favorite driver blow a
tire in a Cup
race borders on paranoia. Race fans are astute enough to
know that a
variety of factors -- being too aggressive with air
pressure or camber,
for instance -- can contribute to tire failure.
“Everybody knows that watches the race that there’s a
reason for a tire
blowing,” Earnhardt said. “It’s not ’cause it’s a bad
tire. We’ve never
had a tire blow because it was defective. They wear out,
and you wear
them down to the air. But you just need to slow down if
you’re wearing
tires out that bad.”
Though Goodyear and NASCAR expressed satisfaction with
the choice of
tire for Atlanta, it’s clear that, from the drivers’
standpoint, the
tire was conservative in the extreme, to the point that
Earnhardt felt
he couldn’t race side-by-side on a track with multiple
grooves.
Earnhardt has tested tires before but says he rarely has
been asked for
feedback.
“The times that I’ve done it, I didn’t feel like my
input was observed
or looked over too well,” he said.
In a follow-up statement released Monday, Goodyear said:
“Even though
both Goodyear and NASCAR were satisfied with the tire’s
performance in
Atlanta, if the drivers are not happy, then Goodyear’s
not happy.”
Let’s hope that’s the case, because -- as Stewart and
Earnhardt insist
-- there has to be a workable middle ground between the
hard tire
supplied for Atlanta and a soft tire that compromises
the safety of the
drivers.
After all, when choosing tires for racetracks, wouldn’t
it be a good
idea to listen to the guys who have to ride on them?
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