Elton Sawyer: NASCAR 'baffled' by severe lack of tire wear at Bristol

NASCAR and its drivers went into this past Saturday’s Round of 16 finale at Bristol expecting similar tire fall-off to what was seen in the spring race back in March.

In the first race at Bristol, tire wear was excessive. This time around, tire wear was non-existent despite Goodyear bringing the identical tire compound to the racetrack. Elton Sawyer, NASCAR senior vice president of competition, said on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio Tuesday they were “baffled” at the lack of tire fall-off throughout the 500-lap race.

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“We’re baffled, to be perfectly honest,” Sawyer said, via Dustin Long of NBC Sports. “We felt like we had a recipe there from the spring that gave us what we’re looking for in our short track racing, putting kind of the tire management back in the driver’s hands.

“We’ve seen some great racing throughout the year. Richmond comes to mind. Watkins Glen, just a week ago with great tire fall-off. The anticipation, as we rolled into Bristol, was that we would see something very similar. Obviously, we didn’t see that as the weekend started to unfold.”

Kyle Larson thoroughly dominated the competition, leading 462-of-500 laps en route to picking up his fifth victory of the season. Larson recorded a 7.1-second margin of victory and put together the third most dominant Bristol win of all-time.

NASCAR ‘disappointed’ by tire performance in Bristol Night Race

With only four leaders, the 2024 Bass Pro Shops Night Race joined the 2023 Bristol Dirt and 2022 spring Martinsville as races with the fewest number of cars pacing the field in the Next Gen car era. There were just eight lead changes throughout the race. With tires not wearing as much as they did in the spring, drivers were posting similar lap times making it hard to pass.

For context, Denny Hamlin took the checkered flag by just one second in March in a race which featured 54 lead changes. Sawyer said the track didn’t take to the rubber in Saturday’s race as it did in March. Perhaps the warmer weather had something to do with that, but nonetheless, NASCAR came away overall “disappointed” in the outcome.

“What we didn’t have is tire wear,” Sawyer said. “We’ll dive into that with our meetings today with our folks at Goodyear to see what maybe they have been able to come up with over the last couple of days in their meetings. Obviously, we were disappointed as a company for our fans. Those are things we’ll learn from and we’ll figure out what happened and get that corrected as we go forward.

“I think the big thing we have to keep in mind is these things happen throughout time. Whether it’s a race event or you go into any type of sporting event. And as you guys said earlier, you’ll have a blowout every now and then. We just need to figure out what happened, how we’re going to correct it. And move forward because we have had some really good short track racing, as well as road course racing, this year. Goodyear’s tire has really contributed a great deal to that.”