Cup Tire Concerns Ultimately Unfounded in Sunday Bristol Race

For the past two years, no NASCAR Cup Series driver has known what to expect when racing at Bristol Motor Speedway.

Last season, the tires barely lasted 40 laps. In the fall, drivers could run well over 100 laps with little to no falloff.

Fast forward to this weekend, and in just two days, drivers experienced a microcosm of that exact scenario.

During practice on a cold Saturday (April 12), drivers were chewing through tires like it was breakfast. Then, come race time on Sunday for the Food City 500, there was no tire wear left to speak of.

In fact, at one point, Ryan Blaney put over 170 laps on his Goodyears without a puncture and was still running far ahead of the field when he pitted for fuel.

Kyle Larson soon took his place at the head of the pack, and the rest was history.

However, there are more drivers to a NASCAR race than the two frontrunners, and two offered particularly interesting perspectives on their experience with the Magic 8 Ball that has become Bristol Motor Speedway.

Michael McDowell finished 30th on the day, and as a series veteran, he’s seen his fair share of races at Bristol. He said that Goodyear has its hands full when it comes to the correct compound to bring to the track and explained the difficulty behind that very job.

“We were two or three degrees from (the tires) only going 30 laps, so the window is pretty tight,” McDowell said. “… I think the margin is really small, and the window is really small, but I do understand that’s a lot of laps on tires, for sure, and I don’t think that’s what we all expected.”

While he finished closely to McDowell, full-time NASCAR Xfinity Series driver Jesse Love found himself in an entirely different position. Love completed his first Cup start in the race, and the unknowns surrounding how the tires would react certainly changed his viewpoint on the race itself.

“That’s what screwed me,” Love said. “I thought it was going to be a tire race, and then I went a lap down trying to not blow a right front, and then it was pretty much fine. We lost a lot of positions when I corded that right front during that one long green-flag run where I was running the top, but I think if that didn’t happen we could have run a little better.”

Love finished one spot behind McDowell in 31st.

Arguably the king of tire saving in the Cup Series, Denny Hamlin offered his perspective as well.

“(The tire wear) is obviously a temperature thing, right?” Hamlin said after finishing second. “It’s a riddle that’s really, really hard to figure out, but certainly in just a 24-hour period, it changes. It seems like just a track temperature issue.”