Denny Hamlin: NASCAR tire production process is 'very imperfect'

This season the talk around tires, especially on short tracks, has popped up many times. Denny Hamlin shined a light on the situation. The NASCAR driver-owner started the year with

With wins this season at Bristol, Richmond, and Dover, Denny Hamlin knows his way around a short track. As a driver, Hamlin has made a career on the short tracks of the Cup Series circuit.

A few weeks ago, after Kyle Larson dominated the field at Bristol in a radically different race than what we saw in the spring, Hamlin talked about tires. Why didn’t we see the same falloff?

Well, it has to do with how the tires are made.

“Other than that, people have to understand that the process of making the tires is a very imperfect process,” said Hamlin on Actions Detrimental. “There’s a lot of reasons to this but I think this is just kind of what I hear, is that where they make the racing tires is very, very, very, very antiquated versus how they make new, street Goodyear tires. The equipment they have, the preciseness of how the tires are put together, the mixture, all that stuff, is very precise on your street tires.

“On the racing, I think that there’s something with like unions and labor where they have ot use more manpower or something, I’m not really sure. Again, I’m trying to make sense of it. I’ve had people from my team, people from 23XI go and visit Goodyear and they were shocked to what they walked into. It was like, ‘Oh wow, this is where we build tires that run 210 miles per hour? Whew…'”

So, what is the deal?

Denny Hamlin: Goodyear has ‘tolerances’ for tires

Goodyear has been making tires for a long time. And that might be the issue. With an outdated production line, according to Denny Hamlin, there are issues. The tire maker even allows for “tolerances” and differences in the final product.

“It’s a very imperfect process and they have tolerances,” Hamlin continued. “You know, even when they make these tires they have tolerances that, ‘We’re okay with this tire coming out being x-amount harder than what it’s supposed to be or x-amount softer than what it’s supposed to be.'”

Now, there are a lot of reasons why a tire would react differently at the same track. When it comes to tires and falloff, heat is a big factor. On a hot day, the track absorbs rubber better, mushing the tire rubber more or less into the cracks and grooves on the track.

That means tires stop wearing down after a while. When there is a lot of rubber on the track tires usually fall off less. It makes the track less abrasive. Then there is the reaction when a track is cold. At times, it causes tires to shred instead of being worn into the track itself.

That is when you get huge falloff and the track continues to wear tires down. We’ve seen it happen at Bristol and Dover in the Next Gen era. There is also the fact that Bristol had more races during the fall weekend than the spring date. Which factors do you believe have the most impact?