Jimmie Johnson nabs win, but fans were the losers

By Dustin Long

INDIANAPOLIS

NASCAR’s blind faith gave fans a race not worth watching Sunday.

The belief that tire problems would fix themselves as they have in recent years at Indianapolis Motor Speedway proved naive and misguided. Eleven cautions – including six specifically to keep tires from blowing and cars wrecking – left fans with no more than 13 consecutive laps of green-flag racing in the 160-lap event.

“It’s embarrassing,” Jeff Gordon said.

“A ridiculous race,” Ryan Newman said.

“I apologize to the fans,” Matt Kenseth said.

Only winner Jimmie Johnson could be happy, but even he admitted “nobody wanted to be in this situation.”

While blame will go to Goodyear and NASCAR for a race that wasn’t as much about competition as survival, the real culprit is a way of thinking.

“We work off a lot of history,” said Robin Pemberton, NASCAR’s vice president of competition, of the sanctioning body’s decision-making process. “We try to develop new stuff, but we also have to rely on a lot of history to get us through some of these things.”

That philosophy works as long as it’s not too rigid – as it seemed to be this time. The new car’s first race at this speedway changed how the tires reacted to the track surface.

Officials know the track grates tires like cheese but that tire wear often improves as the weekend and race progress. The new car, though, puts additional stress on the right-side tires and tire wear remained poor. Where drivers could run more than 30 laps on a set of tires in past races here, they couldn’t run much more than 10 laps Sunday without the right-side tires looking skinned.

“We’ve got to work real hard and find a tire that doesn’t lead us down the road of having faith that it’s going to be OK,” Jeff Burton said. “We got to have a tire that is definitely going to be OK and we know is going to be OK.”

The notion of the car’s Indianapolis debut didn’t seem to alarm anyone, even when a Goodyear tire test in April showed similar tire-wear issues. Dale Earnhardt Jr. said he saw tires show excessive wear within eight laps. Goodyear chose its tire for this race and did no additional on-track testing.

Cup cars did not return to this track until three months later. When series officials realized the problem wasn’t going to get better, it was too late. Goodyear brought 800 tires intended to be used at Pocono this weekend as a backup. None of those tires were needed, but they almost were. Some teams, given at least 10 sets of tires, had no sets left when the checkered flag waved.

Despite the problems, many drivers applauded NASCAR for calling cautions – leading to about one-third of the race being run at reduced speed – instead of waiting for wrecks. Despite the tire problems, only four cars crashed and no one was hurt.

“People are going to complain (that) it didn’t go the way it was supposed to go down but, with the way things were today, that was the best NASCAR could do,” Earnhardt said.

Now, officials will study how to keep this piece of history from repeating. Greg Stucker, Goodyear’s director of race-tires sales, said the company plans to test at this track later this season.

“We take it on our shoulders and we have to improve it,” Stucker said. “But, again, it’s a package. We need to understand the whole thing together (car, tire and track) and try to make it better.”

Joie Chitwood, speedway president, said he didn’t anticipate making any changes to the track before next year’s race.

Pemberton said series officials will do more this time.

“The only thing we can guarantee,” he said, “is a lot of hard work by everybody to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”