As the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs head into Watkins Glen International this weekend for the second race of the three-race opening Round of 16, nobody aside from Joey Logano, who won last weekend’s race at Atlanta Motor Speedway to secure his place in the Round of 12, is feeling safe.
While the 2.45-mile road course in New York has been pretty straightforward in recent years, with Hendrick Motorsports sweeping each of the last five events at the 7-turn layout, tires will be on the minds of every competitor this weekend.
After testing out all sorts of aerodynamic components on the Next Gen car from 2022, until earlier this season, it became abundantly clear that NASCAR was not going to fix what ailed its new car on short tracks and road courses with simple tweaks to the car’s stepped splitter, and underbody components. Instead, the sanctioning body enlisted Goodyear to start creating softer tires, which would create more fall-off over the course of a run.
The softer tires, seen firsthand accidentally at Bristol Motor Speedway in the spring, would allow aggressive drivers to blast past others in the early laps of a run, and drivers, who are excellent at saving their rubber would then have a chance to run them down over the course of a green-flag tire run. So, far, it’s worked rather well on short tracks. This weekend, we’ll get a chance to see a new softer tire compound at the Watkins Glen International road course.
“In our ongoing efforts to introduce more fall-off, we tested at Watkins Glen in June and came out with a new tire that will accomplish that goal,” said Greg Stucker, Goodyear’s director of racing in a press release. “Based on our test, and a subsequent [Wheel-Force] test with the manufacturers, we should see around three seconds of fall-off per lap over a run. That, of course, can mean more passing throughout the race. It’s always tricky on road courses as drivers take advantage of a limited number of ‘passing zones,’ so the increased fall-off should lead to more comers and goers as some drivers manage their tires and gain on the field as the runs go on.”
Three seconds of tire fall-off over the course of a run, as Goodyear is predicting, is significant. And it had a lot of drivers in NASCAR Cup Series Playoff Media Day excited at the aspect of comers and goers at road courses, where tires haven’t typically seen much fall-off throughout the history of NASCAR. It also had drivers feeling a little anxious thinking about the unknowns of the race.
Part of the unknowns are the Stages, which used to be a throwaway for drivers looking to win the overall race in road course events prior to this weekend. Drivers would pull off of the track with two laps remaining in the Stage to grab their tires and gas to set themselves up for better track position in the next Stage as drivers, who decided to stay on track for Stage Points, would pit at the end of the Stages.
With the tires wearing more abruptly, pitting prior to the end of the Stage would now be a disadvantage, and depending on how intense the tire wear truly becomes, it could be a massive disadvantage.
“If there is tire [degradation], which we’re expecting there to be, then yes, there will be a huge incentive to not jump the stage to have fresh tires at the start of the next stage,” Christopher Bell explained. “On the same breath, the road courses and having that yellow flag – the stage breaks – it really entices a lot of different strategy calls.”
Last year, William Byron led 66 of the 90 laps in the NASCAR Cup Series event at Watkins Glen and won the race over Denny Hamlin by 2.632 seconds. Hamlin, one of the best at saving tires in the series today, is welcoming Goodyear’s softer tire for Watkins Glen, and hopes it leads to a drastically different event than what we’ve seen at road courses in years past.
“The driver plays a huge role in [managing tires], so certainly I’ve got my fingers crossed that it’s a race that’s going to be unlike any road course we’ve seen,” Hamlin said with optimism.
Will Sunday’s race at Watkins Glen be another Hendrick Motorsports runaway? Possibly. But if it ends up that way, it’ll likely take a much different strategic approach for the race to play out that way. The unknown of the increased Goodyear tire wear has breathed some life into road racing, which had become extremely stale in the Next Gen era.
The NASCAR Cup Series Go Bowling at The Glen from Watkins Glen International is set for Sunday, September 15 at 3 PM ET and will be televised on USA Network and streamable on the NBC Sports App. The Motor Racing Network (MRN) and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio will carry the radio broadcast of the event.
