NASCAR senior vice president of competition Elton Sawyer admitted “we’re baffled,” after the lack of tire wear in last weekend’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Bristol Motor Speedway.
“We felt like we had a recipe there from the spring that gave us what we’re looking for in our short track racing, putting the tire management back in the driver’s hands,” Sawyer told SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. “We’ve seen some great racing throughout the year. Richmond comes to mind. Watkins Glen just a week ago, with great tire fall-off. So the anticipation as we rolled into Bristol was we would see something very similar.”
“The goal was to at least put the cars in the bottom of the racetrack, give us two lanes to race,” Sawyer said. “We did see that throughout the event, they’d run at the bottom, middle, and top. So, we did have multiple grooves. What we didn’t have was tire wear. We’ll dive into that with our meetings today with our folks at Goodyear to see what maybe they have been able to come up with over the last couple of days in their meetings. Obviously, we were disappointed as a company for our fans but those are things we’ll learn from, figure out what happened, and get that corrected as we go forward.
