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NASCAR's Elton Sawyer on the racing at Bristol: 'Blessing in disguise'

Nick Profile Picby:Nick Geddes•03/20/24•

NickGeddesNews

Bristol
Randy Sartin-USA TODAY Sports

NASCAR senior vice president of competition Elton Sawyer said Wednesday that the extreme tire wear during Sunday’s Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway was a “blessing in disguise.”

Sawyer, speaking on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, said that while the tire wear was a little extreme, it gives NASCAR and Goodyear a blueprint to establish what could work at other short tracks such as Martinsville Speedway and Richmond Raceway.

“What we need to do as I said earlier is learn from what we just experienced this past weekend,” Sawyer said. “Be able to bottle that up and be able to carry that to your Martinsville and carry that to your Richmond’s. It’s not easy. We didn’t walk into Bristol Sunday morning having all this mapped out, it was a blessing in disguise to be able to experience that and now work closely with Goodyear. And [you have to] commend them. You can’t say enough — they’ve been asked to, and the drivers have been asking for this, so this is what they asked for and this is what they got for Sunday.

“Was it a little extreme? Uh, sure. Absolutely. I do believe that if we turn around and ran the race again today with the same tire, the same conditions, same setting and the teams have the opportunity to make some fine adjustments to their settings… the tire wear would be much better than what it was.”

Goodyear to investigate ‘drastic’ tire wear at Bristol Motor Speedway

With resin applied to the racetrack as opposed to PJ1 and Goodyear looking to create a tire that would wear, the combination resulted in the concrete Bristol surface eating up tires at an alarming rate. So much so, NASCAR authorized Goodyear to pass out an additional set of tires during the race to each team. In the end, it was Denny Hamlin who came out the victor, leading a race-high 163 laps.

Understanding why this happened is exactly what Goodyear director of racing Greg Stucker is hoping to find out. Stucker spoke to the media during the race and said that the tire wear was “too drastic.”

“I would agree [that] tire wear is always the goal. That’s what people wanted to see. It creates comers and goers and who manages tires the best. But we thought we were in a really good spot last year with the tire as we raced it in the fall, and something is different now. So, this is too drastic,” Stucker said. “We tested here last year with the intent to come up with a tire package that generated more tire wear. That was the request from NASCAR and the teams.

“We feel like we had a very successful test. Feel like we had a very successful race in the fall of last year because we did exactly that. We ran a full fuel stop [and] definitely saw wear, but we thought it was spot on. So, now we’re trying to understand what’s different. Why is the racetrack behaving differently this weekend than what it did a year ago?”