Tire mishaps make for long day at Brickyard

INDIANAPOLIS -- Debacle, fiasco, blunder: pick any word to describe Sunday's NASCAR-Goodyear screw-up here, but the 250,000 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway deserved much better than what they got in the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard.

Perhaps it was just the perfect storm.

But in short, this race -- with extreme tire wear leading to cautions nearly every 10 laps -- was a disaster. And bizarre.

The primary Goodyear tires were good for 10 laps or so before they wore out down to the cords. So NASCAR officials were forced to turn this 160-lapper into a series of 10-lap sprints.

It was one of the most disappointing races of recent years, and much worse than the tire disaster at Atlanta in March, which led to a firestorm of criticism by drivers aimed at Goodyear.

At least no one was injured Sunday.

Jimmie Johnson proved the ultimate survivor, winning the four-hour race, with the fastest car in the field, deftly running through this minefield and edging Carl Edwards and Denny Hamlin in a seven-lap shootout finish to a tense, unusual afternoon at one of the world's most famous tracks.

"Carl put as much pressure on me as he could," Johnson said. "So I just made sure I hit my marks. Those last seven laps were white-knuckle."

So were all the others, too.

"We didn't realize until the end of practice that this track wasn't taking rubber," Johnson said. "This tire just didn't work like it did last year. But I don't think we all realized we had a problem until way, way late.

"Every corner of every lap I was worried about it. As a group we all knew we couldn't push the envelope.

"It was an interesting race ... and it put a lot of pressure on the pit crew. NASCAR called a great race, and they kept us from tearing up cars. We'll all take our lumps, I'm sure, but we'll come back next year and put on a better show."

Edwards was both frustrated and embarrassed with the way that the day went: "It was a long day.... I know everybody is trying to do their best. Personally I want to tell the fans that everybody was doing their best. At least we got to race hard those last seven laps.

"We don't like to race like this.... and it will get better. The tire debacle.... NASCAR did the best it could after the race got started.

"I've heard people go on tirades. But we're all doing our best. Obvious it was a mistake with the tire. But everybody makes mistakes. They thought the tire rubber would fill in the cracks, but it didn't.

"Nobody wanted to see something like this ...''

"But I don't care if they only race 10 laps at a time -- it's the same for everyone. I'm sure we won't have a race like this again. I'm sure there will be better testing after this ... maybe with a NASCAR test car."

In the end the two fastest went head-to-head. "I truly believed we were going to get by Jimmie and win that race, I thought I was faster than Jimmie, but he was holding back more than I thought," Edwards said. "We just need to do a better job qualifying. Jimmie had a better pit. If we'd been down there...."

Drivers ran scared throughout the afternoon, and that was evident in their radio chatter.

Up until late Saturday evening, things appeared fairly normal here but in the final pre-race practice it had become clear that the excessive tire wear was not getting any better -- the longest run anyone could put together Saturday was 11 laps, much shorter than the usual 35 laps here. So overnight Goodyear hauled in an extra 800 tires, from the Pocono stash, to supplement the 3,200 tires already here. Goodyear never had to dip into that stash, but it had no Indy tires left at the end. With 30 laps to go, NASCAR told teams they had two sets of tires to use to make it to the end.

Hamlin said: "We were put in a box, and nobody could run as hard as they wanted to. With only three drivers (Dale Earnhardt Jr., Kurt Busch and Brian Vickers) coming here to tire-test, it's going to be hard to get all the data you need.

"But I've got to applaud NASCAR for putting the cautions out.... About every 10 laps something was going to happen anyway, even if they didn't throw the caution.

"Around lap 81/2 you could start to feel a vibration, and you'd start to throttle it back, because you knew you were about to wreck. When I wanted to run hard, I could look like I was 20 mph faster ... but I knew I'd have to pay for it in the end."

The situation, in brief:

-- The track hasn't been altered since last summer's 400.

-- The tire compound and design wasn't significantly different from tires used last summer, though this point may be debated this week.

-- Yesterday's weather was comfortable, and certainly not an issue.

-- The only major difference this time was the racecar itself -- so NASCAR's winged car may have taken a fierce public-relations hit.

This car, being used this season in all 36 Sprint Cup tour races for the first time, has been a problem at the sport's midsize tracks, with handling difficulties. And it has not improved the competition on the track, with drivers complaining about not being able to run side-by-side.

But this race may have been the low point for the model. With its high center-of-gravity, the car has shown a decided tendency to eat right-side tires. And on this flat, high-speed, and very abrasive track, right-side tires took a terrible beating all weekend.

However, even at that, it was extremely curious that the track never took rubber. That would seem to point the finger at Goodyear's rubber compound as being at fault.

Some crews said they felt that the compound was indeed different, and as the tires wore, they shed clouds of dry rubber rather than sticky rubber that might have clung better to the asphalt.

Andy Petree, the two-time championship crew chief, called it "the most severe tire situation I've ever seen."

(Contact Mike Mulhern at mmulhern@wsjournal.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)