NASCAR insiders predict tire wear situation at Martinsville

NASCAR will debut a new tire for Sunday’s Cup Series playoff race at Martinsville Speedway, giving crews a new left-side tire compound for the race.

Insiders are split on how much impact that new tire will have on things.

“I think it’ll be a lot of talk about, ‘Oh it’s going to do this and the racing’s going to be different and it’s such a different tire,'” The Athletic’s Jeff Gluck said on The Teardown podcast. “Then everyone will be racing and be like, ‘It actually wasn’t what we thought it was going to be.'”

The right-side tires on Sunday will actually be the option tire from the NASCAR All-Star Race at North Wilkesboro Speedway and Richmond Raceway, a tire that had some mixed results.

It was a softer compound that generated more speed on the shorter run but wore out quicker than a standard tire. That brought some interesting strategy into play at Richmond.

The left-side tire this weekend, meanwhile, will be one of Goodyear’s softest compounds used in NASCAR.

“Here’s what a crew chief said to me, because I asked him about that, and I try not to get on the tire stuff and what it’s going to do,” The Athletic’s Jordan Bianchi said. “He goes, ‘Listen, they go there, they tested it, it showed wear. OK. How many cars are on the race track? How many green flag laps did they run? We’re going up there, we’re going to have 36 cars on the track, we’re going to get long green flag runs. We don’t know what the weather is going to be like, but the track is going to rubber up. And what happens when the track rubbers up? The wear goes down. You don’t have as much wear necessarily.”

If things play out that way, the strategy element goes down a good deal and cars should mostly be able to get a normal run without much consideration for when to switch tires.

That would lead to the tires not having a huge impact on the pivotal NASCAR race, like Gluck had suggested.

“So based on that conversation, I lean toward you,” Bianchi told Gluck. “I believe it when I see it. Now could we go there and we have a Richmond type thing where they brought an option tire and we saw what a difference that made? Sure, absolutely. But why couldn’t it be a North Wilkesboro situation as well? I don’t know.”

Either way, there will be a lot on the line in NASCAR on Sunday.

“I think it’s going to be interesting. I hope there’s tire wear,” Bianchi said. “We saw today what tire wear does. It adds an element of putting this in the driver’s hands, putting this in the crew chief’s hands. It opens up the strategy playbook and all these things. So I hope to all hope that there is tire wear. But to feel confident saying that’s going to happen, I can’t do that.”