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Stewart Smokes His Tires

by Tim Zaegel on March 10th, 2008

In listening to and reading post-race comment after the running of Sunday’s Kobalt Tools 500, you’d never know that Tony Stewart, Dale Earnhardt Jr, and Jeff Gordon all finished inside the top-five based on their commentary alone. In what’s turning into an ongoing saga between the race car drivers and Goodyear that started months ago when Goodyear started making tweaks to their tire packages both in an effort to accommodate NASCAR’s “Car of Tomorrow” and also to implement a safer tire for the sport, things really started heating up after a long day ended disastrously for several of NASCAR’s top stars a week ago in Las Vegas.

Tony Stewart – NASCAR’s most outspoken star – has been at the helm of this criticism after cutting a right front tire in Sin City that sent him smacking the turn 2 wall in what he’s described as one of the hardest hits he’s taken in a very long time. Despite the fact that there wasn’t a single tire incident reported in Atlanta from anyone in the 43-car field, the man known as “Smoke” continued to berate NASCAR’s official tire supplier immediately following the race, citing “that was the most pathetic tire I’ve ever raced on in my professional career.” He then went on to state that Goodyear has done a very poor job in building their tires and that they should be embarrassed about what they brought to the track over the weekend.

NASCAR’s most popular driver, Dale Earnhardt Jr, wasn’t quite as bold as his friend Stewart in the post-race interviews on Fox, but did criticize Goodyear as well by insinuating that it was just a bad combination that they brought to Atlanta Motor Speedway. However, later on after the race, he did have a little bit more to say. “I don’t think, for one, that the race was all that exciting. We couldn’t run side-by-side or we’d wreck. We had to let each other go by. Everytime you got beside a guy, you were just like ‘Take it’. He continued, “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 those other drivers or anybody is going to do it. Hopefully, we can all get along and come up with something better than this.”

Things didn’t get any easier for Goodyear when it was time for NASCAR’s most prestigious driver to speak up. Jeff Gordon told the media, “I felt like I was going to crash every single lap … that was the hardest day I’ve ever had at Atlanta, especially for a top-five finish. This car and this tire at this track was just terrible.”

Justin Fantozzi, the marketing manager at Goodyear, responded by stating, “To get into attacks in the media is not the right place. We’re tremendously proud of the wear rates that we saw here.” He later went onto say, “We’ll do the exact same thing that we do every race. We have a post-race data analysis meeting. We now have a new set of data and we’ll go back and sit down with the engineers and go through the process again. Driver comments are part of the data set. It’s temperature, it’s wear rates, it’s driver comments, it’s feel, it’s grip, it’s overall race pace. So, we’ll look at the overall data set and then we’ll make that decision.”

“The reason we’re talking about it is that we don’t want to have to race on tires like we raced on Sunday every week. This wasn’t fun. There wasn’t anything about Sunday’s race that was fun for anybody. I ran second, and I wouldn’t re-run this race for any amount of money in the world. It was just that bad,” says Stewart.

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