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Wednesday, Mar. 12, 2008

Harrison: Tire issues are a serious problem

Tony Stewart's complaining Sunday wasn't his typical whining just to be whining. It actually had some substance behind it.

Stewart's rants can sometimes be dismissed as his typical complaints, But when handfuls of other drivers, including some of NASCAR's biggest names, expressed the difficulty of racing 500 miles at Atlanta with the tire from Goodyear, it exposes a serious problem.

"Goodyear doesn't like to hear people bashing their tires, and I don't like doing it, but I ain't going to sit here and put up with this," Dale Earnhardt Jr. said Sunday. "Hopefully we can all get along and come up with something better than this."

The current tire problem is not just about the cars being hard to drive, either. Driving in NASCAR isn't meant to be easy. It never has been. Getting these new cars around the track is more difficult than in the past, with the Car of Tomorrow being raced on some larger tracks for the first time.

One thing that racing in NASCAR should be about, however, is putting on a good show for the fans, especially at a track like Atlanta known for its exciting side-by-side racing and close finishes.

Goodyear certainly missed the boat from the standpoint of giving teams a tire that they could easily race against one another with. Truthfully, the tire given to teams Sunday handcuffed the drivers so much that it produced probably the least exciting Atlanta race that I can remember watching during the years that I have been keeping up with racing. The cars were so undriveable because of the tire that side-by-side racing was hard to come by for the most part, taking away one of the biggest reasons that racing is exciting at Atlanta.

Yes, drivers will pull away from the pack at tracks like Atlanta, and the field will get stretched out from time to time. But in those cases, there is usually two- or three-wide racing in the back of the pack at AMS, something that was pretty much impossible Sunday.

With the tire that Goodyear gave teams, both racing in Atlanta and the point of the Car of Tomorrow have been set back by leaps and bounds. Goodyear went way too far toward making a tire safe to drive on and focused far too little on having a tire that is at least driveable.

The good news is that the series' next two races are at short tracks, Bristol and Martinsville, giving time for Goodyear to get its affairs in order before the race at Texas. Between now and then, a good tactic would be for Goodyear to actually utilize a bigger chunk of the money that it rakes in as being the sole supplier of tires for teams in NASCAR. Unfortunately, teams can't race Hoosiers like they did during the infamous "Tire Wars" during the early part of the 1990s.

NASCAR and Goodyear are stuck together through at least 2012. It's pretty much up to Goodyear right now how it wants to be portrayed. It can either be the bunch of people helping racing improve, or it can be a group of folks that made the Car of Tomorrow a farce on 1.5-mile tracks.

"I don't know what it's going to take to get them to give us a quality tire that this series and NASCAR deserves," Stewart said. "But they obviously aren't capable of doing it right now."