In NASCAR or any major sporting events, the concept of expectation versus reality can be a very fickle thing. Case-in-point, Saturday’s Bass Pro Shops Night Race at Bristol.
For several people, the expectations were an event like the Food City 500 in March, where drivers were forced to conserve their tires throughout the run, to avoid a dramatic tire fall-off late in the run.
The reality was… not that, at all.
Kyle Larson dominated Saturday’s NASCAR Cup Series event at Bristol, leading 462 of 500 laps — the most at Bristol since Cale Yarborough led 495 of 500 laps in 1977. The race featured only eight changes, compared to a record-breaking 54 in March.
The complete lack of tire wear in Saturday’s event at the half-mile short track totally contradicts what the racetrack provided in the Spring, and needless to say, that’s confused a ton of people.
NASCAR is included in that group of confused parties, according to Elton Sawyer, Senior Vice President of Competition for NASCAR, who spoke to SiriusXM NASCAR Radio on Tuesday.
“We’re baffled, to be perfectly honest,” Sawyer said. “We felt like that 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.”
Throughout the year, NASCAR and Goodyear have been collaborating to make changes to tire compounds, to provide an even better on-track product on the short tracks, that have struggled with the NextGen car.
“We’ve seen some great racing throughout the year,” Sawyer added. “Richmond comes to mind. Watkins Glen, just a week ago with great tire fall-off. The anticipation as we rolled into Bristol, was that we would see something very similar. Obviously, we didn’t see that as the weekend started to unfold.”
The biggest difference between March and September? The track took rubber in last Saturday’s event, whereas the half-mile speedway didn’t do that in March.
“What we didn’t have is 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. Those are things we’ll learn from and we’ll figure out what happened and get that corrected as we go forward.”
The final two events of the season — Martinsville and Phoenix — are at tracks shorter than one mile. The penultimate race of the season at Martinsville will use a softer tire compound, but Phoenix will maintain its tire compound from its Spring event.
NASCAR is hopeful that the Martinsville tire will help improve the racing at the half-mile paperclip that is beloved by fans and potentially give the sanctioning body and Goodyear a direction to go in for next season, and beyond.
