NASCAR drivers, crews apologize to fans

By Mike Mulhern
Media General News Service
Published: July 28, 2008

INDIANAPOLIS - Emotions ran high throughout and after yesterday’s Allstate 400 at the Brickyard, with major tire problems turning one of this sport’s biggest events into the year’s most bizarre race.

And the second-guessing was well under way even before the start of the four-hour race at legendary Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Now this race wasn’t as bad as that ignominious U.S. Grand Prix here a few years back, when Michelin had to pull out of the race because its tires were dangerously deficient — leaving six drivers to run the race, on more conservative Bridgestones.

But it was close — with NASCAR forced to run the 400 miles as a series of 10-lap sprints because of terrible tire wear. It was bad enough that some here were calling for fans to get ticket refunds.

Joie Chitwood, speedway president, said “We appreciate NASCAR and Goodyear working closely together to manage the tire situation and to get the cars to the checkered flag. Obviously it’s not the race you want to present to the largest crowd to watch a stock car race this year, but we do appreciate the hard work of the drivers and teams.

“If more testing is needed, we will make the facility available.”

This sport is facing rugged times as it is, with $4 a gallon gas, too many empty seats, and reluctant sponsors, and NASCAR certainly doesn’t need a black-eye embarrassment like this.

Drivers and crews were more than angry, they were apologetic to the fans: “I’ve got to apologize to the fans,” Brian Vickers said. “We’ve got some awesome fans…. and I don’t want to point the finger at anybody, but it’s the culmination of a lot of things that caused the problems we’re seeing with the tires. We as a sport should have done better.

“I’m embarrassed; I’m sure a lot of people are. But we appreciate everybody staying here, watching the race and sticking behind us.”

Ticket refunds might not be in the cards for this NASCAR Sprint Cup event, but someone in Daytona and Akron should be held accountable for this mess, one way or the other.

However NASCAR — and all its teams — did an admirable job of working through the jam, though they never should have let things get to this point.

Yesterday morning everyone was sweating things, but no one knew just how it might all develop. NASCAR planned to throw yellows every 10 laps for the first part of the race, and officials hoped the track would take enough rubber to make the race OK.

That never happened.

Matt Kenseth never made it to the finish: “This is one of the two biggest races of the year, and to never have this tire here before and not come and do an open test and to work on these things and work on the tires, it’s pretty darn disappointing.

“I feel bad for the fans — we’re running three-quarters speed because we’re worried about the tires blowing out … and they got blown out every eight laps.

“You get about six-corners-worth of warning — about a lap and a half. It started shaking about three seconds before it blew out.”

Jamie McMurray: “It’s just frustrating…. and I got mad in the middle of the race, because they were letting us run until somebody blew a tire. I’m like ‘You can’t put us in that situation.’ You’ve got to throw the caution before we blow a tire, because if someone gets hurt, we could have prevented that.”

Clearly someone dropped the ball in the weeks leading up to this event. And that Atlanta tire disaster in the spring still hasn’t been forgotten.

Car owner Jack Roush was suspicious about the entire tire situation, pointing out that Ford wasn’t invited to the test: “This is a game of inches, but Goodyear didn’t give us a chance to test here. They brought other manufacturers here and they didn’t give us a chance to test.

“You need to go talk to Chad Knaus (the winning crew chief, and teammate of tire tester Dale Earnhardt Jr.) He said it wasn’t going to be a problem with this tire. He and Goodyear have got something figured out that the rest of us don’t.”

But NASCAR’s Robin Pemberton, who worked pit road hard all afternoon, checking with crews, said “You can criticize all you wan t… but when we have a surface like this, we have to anticipate where the tires and the competition will meet on Sunday afternoon. And we have challenges when we develop tires here, because we have such a dramatic change in surface grip as the track rubbers in.

“When Goodyear did its test (in April), they felt they were on target, based on what we’ve dealt with here last year and the year before. We felt it would come to us by race day. It didn’t happen like that.

“In the race, we’d try to get to 11 or 12 laps, but we never could. In fact even 10 was really a stretch for us.

“We’ll just have to take what we learned and do better next year.”

Pemberton said, all things considered, everyone involved rose to the occasion.

“All of our men and women did a great job, the drivers and crews, too,” Pemberton said. “I walked up and down pit road all day, talking with crews about their tire wear.

“Honestly this was one of the biggest group efforts I’ve ever seen. I’m proud of everybody. My hat’s off to the competitors for helping us manage the situation.

“You know we all want to do the very best we can. And obviously we’ll do a better job the next time around. We can’t take anything for granted when we come back.”

And for the disappointed fans?

“If they’re good fans, they’ll understand that occasionally something like this happens,” Pemberton said. “It’s OK to be disappointed. And we can be just as disappointed right along with you.

“We’re here to put on the best races we can, and we do a damned good job of it most of the time. Everyone here works very hard to do that — all the teams and officials and partners.”

NASCAR president Mike Helton, halfway through the race, conceded things weren’t going very well at all: “The main thing all day is to keep it as safe as we can on the race track … and as evenly balanced for all the competitors.

“That’s why we’ve had these competition cautions, more than we intended to have.”

A competition caution is a yellow deliberately thrown to allow teams to pit under caution to assess the tire situation. Usually one, maybe two, a race. But yesterday NASCAR was forced to throw yellows almost every 10 laps.

NASCAR also pulled a surprise by closing pit road at times arbitrarily, to keep teams from pitting.

Helton said the track usually rubbers up during a weekend, taking rubber in the pores, thus improving tire wear.

However this tire — apparently because of its rubber compound — didn’t rubber up the track.

Helton said he had hoped “this track would rubber up sooner or later, and the length (of greens) would get longer. But for whatever reason it hasn’t done that. So we’ll just keep managing it. We’ve got plenty of tires.

“We’re 80-some laps into this race (160 laps), and usually in the past when we’ve had similar situations, it’s gotten better by this point.”

Could this have been avoided?

“I don’t know, that’s a good question,” Helton said. “To our knowledge the track hasn’t been changed since last year, and the compound of this tire isn’t much different than the compound last year.

“Goodyear did come in April and tested this tire for this event.

“And these temperatures aren’t bad.

“So there are a lot of unanswered questions.

“The effort today is to keep the race safe and to get it accomplished in the best manner possible.

“This isn’t the way we wanted to do it, but we’ll stay on top of it.”

Nevertheless teams were not happy, to say the least. “Those NASCAR and Goodyear officials ought to be wearing bags over their heads when they leave this track,” one championship crew chief grumbled.

“NASCAR has been waiting for us crew chiefs to come up with some magic bullets to fix this car-of-tomorrow, but it’s just not there — the problem is simply a matter of physics,” another winning crew chief said.

NASCAR and Goodyear found themselves in a similar situation at Dover in 1994, and Goodyear had to come up with a Saturday night solution to a similar tire disaster. But at Dover Goodyear came up with a brilliant game plan for that race, using three different types of tires in the race, and the race itself was a good one.

This time, though, nothing worked.

Considerable blame was focused on NASCAR for not holding a major test here before the race. Winning car owner Rick Hendrick said this shows NASCAR will have to radically change its testing rules: “With this new car, we may need to have to test with everybody.

“And with a race this big, we should have had everybody here to test.”

“But I don’t think an open test here would have helped us do all we needed to get done,” Pemberton said. “Hindsight is always 20-20. So we’ll just have to learn from this and try to do a better job next time.”