Chad Fletcher, left, and Billy...
Chad Fletcher, left, and Billy Hodges check damage to the Timberwolf car tire that failed during the BGN race at Homestead. Most of the tire failures were on the right-front and failed along the outside edge.
Mark Keto, Goodyear's lead engineer, says that with durability being one of its main concerns, "we brought a very conservative tire recommendation to Homestead, primarily based on the fact that we are dealing with a track that has brand-new pavement." Some drivers said they really couldn't feel much difference in the new construction. "It's hard to say one is better than the other," says Ron Hornaday Jr. "Maybe next year [2004] we'll be able to tell."
The tires ran flawlessly on the Craftsman Trucks. But trouble began in Saturday's Busch race and got worse during Sunday's Winston Cup finale. Busch drivers Joe Nemecheck, Elliott Sadler, and Jason Keller all had blisters on their tires, and David Green had a failure early in the race. Greg Biffle had a tire failure about mid-way in the Busch contest. The tire was damaged too heavily for Goodyear to do an accurate post-mortem on it. It was the first of three tire failures Biffle had that weekend.
During Sunday's Winston Cup race, he had a tire go bad during a long green flag run. The failure put him two laps down. Then on lap 199 a second tire failed, slamming him into the wall hard enough that he had to go to the infield care center for a checkup.
"The car was pushing really badly," Biffle says. "After the first tire failed, we talked to Goodyear and adjusted the pressures, but it didn't help the handling. The tire just suddenly let go."
Most of the tires that failed seemed to fail on the outside edge where the sidewall and tread meet. It is the area of the front tire that generates the most heat if the car is pushing badly, or on the rear tire if the car is loose. "It really gave no warning," Biffle says. "The car just sort of laid the right-front corner down and it was gone." The tire blew in a track area where the cars were going about 192 mph. Homestead's remodeling included the new SAFER barrier walls, so Biffle walked away with only sore muscles.
After the Homestead race, Goodyear's Stucker said the company wasn't surprised at the results: "We saw about what we expected on a repave with this configuration-fresh asphalt, dark aggregate. We saw a lot of heat buildup during our tire test, and that's why we brought one of our most heat resistant tread compounds. We've worked with the teams. We advised them to scuff the tires on short practice runs to help reduce heat-build. We did see some blisters on several cars, but not any more severe than what we had anticipated might happen."
That wasn't much of a salve for guys like Elliott and Biffle. "I'm really kind of concerned," Biffle said after he got out of the Homestead care center. "We had a lot of tire failures, and beginning next year we are going to be using it at a lot of tracks where we run much faster than we do here."