Denny Hamlin reveals expectations for new tires at Martinsville

NASCAR will debut a new tire from Goodyear at Martinsville Speedway this weekend for a Cup Series playoff race.

The new left-side tire will be the softest compound Goodyear has ever used, which could throw some significant wrinkles into game-planning for the various Cup Series teams looking to secure a quality finish. Strategy could be a big element Sunday on the short track.

Drivers, though, don’t entirely know how the tire will play at Martinsville.

“I wish I knew, because I would try to prepare for it,” Denny Hamlin said on his Actions Detrimental podcast. “But we’ve got a new tire there that’s going to be the softest left-side tire that I think NASCAR has ever made, or Goodyear has ever made. The right-side is the, I think, like the prime tire softness. Hopefully we get some tire wear. I mean that’s what we hope is that we have tires that wear out and then you start to see some comers and goers and lots of passing. That’s what we hope.”

Hamlin broke down how the change at Martinsville could impact things.

“Then setup will matter more, driver’s gonna matter more. All those things,” Hamlin said. “But I don’t think anyone knows kind of what we’re getting ourselves into until we get there.”

One of the reasons the crews don’t quite know what to expect is that it’s almost impossible to know how quickly the track will pick up rubber. As it does so, the wear on the tires starts to lessen.

That means there could be a significant strategy portion of the race, followed by a more straightforward finish.

Teams are just doing their best to make educated guesses on how that will play out at Martinsville.

“Well the team has data on the tires and they try to make their best guesses for what they’ll need at the car for that new tire,” Hamlin said. “Sometimes you’ll guess right, sometimes you’ll guess wrong.”

As for the other elements, Hamlin broke down what he expects to see play out at Martinsville.

“Well we know for certain that this tire is softer. You can stick what they call a durometer in the tire itself and it tells you how gummy, how soft the tire is,” Hamlin said. “So that should promote more tire wear. Now the difficult part about it is that a tire that does shed rubber, it sheds it onto the race track, so then it fills in all the pores of the race track and then tire wear will not be as big of an issue after halfway through the race or so.

“So it’s going to be a balance to see how this all works out, but I’m excited that we actually made a big, big jump and change trying to fix some of these short tracks.”