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Greg Biffle was one of the participants testing Goodyear tires at the newly repave Darlington Raceway in Darlington, South Carolina. (Todd Warshaw/Getty Images Photo) ยป More Photos
Tires continue to be a subject of major discussion among the NASCAR Sprint Cup drivers following last weekend’s race at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
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After that race, several drivers were highly critical of Goodyear’s tire choice for the track, most vocally Tony Stewart, who unleashed a fusillade of insults on Goodyear on live nationwide television.
A tire test Monday at the newly repaved Darlington Raceway exacerbated concerns, as entry speed into Turn 3 of the 1.3-mile track were 200 miles per hour, up from the low 180 mph-range previously.
“Exactly what I suspected was gonna happen when they said last year they’re gonna re-pave Darlington happened,” said Greg Biffle of Roush Fenway Racing, one of three drivers to test at the track on Monday. “I think we all knew it, but it’s extremely fast. Too fast for that size of race track, and it’s just the combination and the same thing we’ve faced everywhere we’ve gone with a re-pave – Charlotte, Vegas – reconfiguration and all that. It’s just extremely, extremely fast because of our cars today and how much grip that we’ve been able to get out of our cars and tires and how much power we make now.
“We went 200 miles an hour into Turn 3 at Darlington – 200 miles an hour, a 1.3-mile track, a 28 (second)-flat lap time and I could go faster than that probably,” said Biffle. “But that’s two-and-a-half seconds faster than we were going. It’s just astronomically fast. You just won’t be able to race at that speed and, on top of that, the tire wouldn’t survive that kind of loading.”
Biffle then said Goodyear tried a drastically harder tire, but that didn’t work, either. “Goodyear backed up on tires and went on
“We came to some decent conclusions in the essence that we’re going to go back one more time and do a final tire test with a different tire and try to hit a middle road with the two options that they had,” said Daytona 500 winner Ryan Newman, who also participated in the Darlington test. “One felt really good and wasn’t going to last and the other one didn’t feel so good and was going to last too good. We’ll work with Goodyear and the three teams that were there and go back to do another tire test – a short abbreviated test – where we can prove that the tires will be ideal for the track.”
Too-hard tires were the complaint Stewart and some of the others had, but if the tires aren’t hard enough, the are susceptible to failure – usually in the form of a right-front failure at top speed entering a corner, which is not an acceptable state of affairs, either.
“Let’s face it, they (Goodyear) don’t want us complaining about the tire being too hard, yet it can’t come apart,” said Biffle. “There’s a middle ground there. We’ve backed Goodyear in a corner and said, ‘You’ve got to control how fast we go, a tire that has a lot of grip and a tire that doesn’t come apart.’ That’s a tough order for them to come up with all of those items at once.”
FOOD CITY 500 PRACTICE 1 RESULTS
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