Blistering Pace at a Blistering Place at BetLM

Blistering Pace at a Blistering Place

BROOKLYN, Mich. (NASCAR/Newsfeed) — Michi­gan Inter­na­tional Speed­way proved to be blis­ter­ingly fast Fri­day, which isn’t nec­es­sar­ily a good thing. With prac­tice speeds once again top­ping 200 mph, sev­eral dri­vers expe­ri­enced issues with blis­ter­ing tires on the recently repaved 2-mile oval.

It was so fast, indeed, that Goodyear will make a tire change for the race — a deci­sion that came after a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of cars ended up with blis­tered tires. To accom­mo­date the switch — a new, and “tougher” left-side tire from Char­lotte, accord­ing to a NASCAR release — NASCAR has added a fifth prac­tice ses­sion, which will come not only after Saturday’s qual­i­fy­ing run but also after the Nation­wide Series race. The ses­sion is sched­uled to start at 6 p.m. ET and go for approx­i­mately 75 min­utes, using the new left-side rub­ber pro­vided by Goodyear.

Goodyear’s direc­tor of race-tire sales, Greg Stucker, said that “about a quar­ter” of the Cup teams in the garage com­plained about the left-side blistering.

Kevin Har­vick was one of those who saw blis­ter­ing issues on both left-side tires and his right-rear after attempt­ing a longer run.

“Our biggest con­cern right now is we’ve seen sev­eral of those sit­u­a­tions through the garage,” Har­vick said. “I don’t know that many peo­ple ran enough laps to really get to the blis­ter­ing point. It’s either going to come down to the race track get­ting more rub­ber on it and the speeds slow­ing down, or it’s just going to come down to you slow­ing down and man­ag­ing the pace to keep the tires on the car.”

Stucker said this weekend’s speed increase was expected, although Greg Biffle’s lap of 204.708 mph near the end of Friday’s Happy Hour cer­tainly raised some eyebrows.

“We ran about 36.4 [sec­onds] in our test [in April],” Stucker said. “That was the fastest lap, and obvi­ously, we’re run­ning sig­nif­i­cantly faster than that now. We knew it would be faster but not quite as fast as it is.

“The blis­ter­ing is def­i­nitely heat-related. It’s aggra­vated by par­tic­u­lar setups. That’s why we’re see­ing it pre­dom­i­nately on some peo­ple and not at all on others.”

Because of that, Friday’s Happy Hour turned into one-lappy hour, as many teams used much of the prac­tice to scuff all of their race tires in prepa­ra­tion for Sunday’s Quicken Loans 400. Michael Wal­trip Rac­ing team­mates Mark Mar­tin and Mar­tin Truex Jr. both com­pleted more than 45 laps each.

That didn’t keep Bif­fle from rip­ping off the weekend’s best lap to edge Mar­cos Ambrose. Har­vick, Carl Edwards and Paul Menard rounded out the top five, as 14 dri­vers exceeded 200 mph.

“I wish I could tell you that lap, I was hold­ing my breath and was on edge,” Bif­fle said. “But it must be a lot of adren­a­line because I really don’t remem­ber my lift points or when I got on the gas pedal. You get so in the moment, and we scuffed in so many sets of tires and every­thing, now I have to sit and think about how I did it — because I have to do it again [Saturday].

“The car just really stuck to the ground really well. So it actu­ally wasn’t that hard to drive. It’s actu­ally a lit­tle bit harder to drive on low air and new tires.”

The only inci­dent came when Jamie McMur­ray scraped the right side of his car after con­tact with the out­side wall. His crew spent most of the rest of the ses­sion repair­ing the sheet metal damage.

For a brand-new track, Denny Ham­lin didn’t notice any unusual or unex­pected tire wear.

“We ran a com­plete fuel run on one set of tires,” Ham­lin said. “So we’re ana­lyz­ing that set right now. There was some decent right-side wear. But I think once the race gets going, the right-side wear will sub­side. It typ­i­cally does.”

Like Ham­lin, Edwards hadn’t seen any prob­lems with his tires. But he wasn’t sur­prised, based on the amount of stress placed on them, given the high speeds, increase in grip and ris­ing temperatures.

“The cars are going so fast and they’re mak­ing so much grip,” Edwards said. “It’s hard to imag­ine a lit­tle area about the size of this [6 inch by 16 inch] plas­tic plac­ard, and those four lit­tle spots like that are mak­ing all that fric­tion and some­how Goodyear has to make that work. That’s a lot of force out there.

“I’m sure NASCAR will look at it, I’m sure Goodyear will look at it. I’m cer­tainly going to go to [crew chief Bob Osborne] right after this and talk about it. We’ll try to make a long run and then we’ll watch the Nation­wide cars.”

They all looked at it and, obvi­ously, a deci­sion was made to switch tires and also add the practice.

So why didn’t this issue show up dur­ing the tire test in April, or even last week­end at Pocono? Har­vick said that’s one of the vari­ables for which you can’t always plan. And that’s no fault of the tire manufacturer.

For instance, the dif­fer­ences in tem­per­a­ture between the spring test and this week­end are significant.

“You just never know when you get to a new race track, how fast every­body is going to run,” Har­vick said. “That’s really the hard­est thing that Goodyear has to deal with.

“I think [Thurs­day] we ran a sec­ond faster than what they ran at the [April] test. [When] they tested, it was 40 or 50 degrees up here. It’s going to be 90 [Sunday].”

The key, Har­vick said, is try­ing not to get too aggres­sive with chas­sis setups, because long green-flag runs at Michi­gan are the norm rather than the exception.

And the pre­vail­ing opin­ion in the garage is that Sunday’s race will play out much like Pocono, where times dropped as much as a sec­ond a lap as the tires began to wear.

Ham­lin has had his crit­i­cisms about tire selec­tion in the past, but not this weekend.

“As much as I give Goodyear a hard time about their hard tires and every­thing, when we’ve had these new-paved race tracks, they’ve done an awe­some job match­ing the sur­face to the tire,” Ham­lin said. “It not only makes for very fast speeds but it gives us a car with grip. It’s some­thing we can tune on. I haven’t seen those issues and the race will play out very sim­i­lar to the way it did at Pocono.”

BetLM's sports betting news features unique sports betting articles as well as current sports news compiled from leading wire services. This arti­cle was dis­trib­uted by Syn­di­cated Sports news wire and aggre­ga­tion ser­vice, For more NASCAR rac­ing news see: Blis­ter­ing pace at a blis­ter­ing place.

Related Posts:

• Ford to Use All-Electric Car as NASCAR Pace Car
• Fry: Fer­rari Still Almost a Sec­ond Off the Pace
• Player Takes His Place as Hon­orary Starter
• Coy­otes Win to Take First Place in Pacific Division
• Pats Pres­i­dent Kraft Unwill­ing to Place Judg­ment on Gronkowski

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•