This piece touches on the tires issues that NASCAR experienced this weekend, a bit on Jennifer Jo Cobb standing up for herself, and the race itself. I close this piece out with what sounds like a disappointing set of sound bytes from Carl Edwards.
Goodyear Tire Issues
It was an interesting weekend at Bristol Motor Speedway. When both the NASCAR Nationwide Series and NASCAR Sprint Cup Series leagues had issues with their Goodyear tires. They were burning through the tires that Goodyear provided, within 30 laps of use during practice time. Goodyear responded by bringing tires with a different compound mix.
Goodyear indicated in an interview that they took last years’ compound from Bristol and made a small adjustment to it, not realizing that such a small change could have had such a drastic change of wear.
It felt like Indianapolis all over again, if anyone remembers that, teams had to stop every 10 laps to change tires. It was quite the debacle. This time around, Goodyear was set and ready to help out and redistributed tires with a new compound mix to all the teams in both series, at no charge to the teams.
I have a few quick observations:
Greg Biffle said it best when asked about the new tires when he indicated that it would have been just fine to put tire management back into the hands of the driver. I don’t disagree with that and enjoyed the day when drivers had control their tire wear, at least a bit more then than they do now.
NASCAR forcing teams to NOT change out their bad tires for new tires because it was an impound race created a conflict in my brain. I get the premise of leaving the cars as is, from qualifying. Yet to have a mindset that is so set in their way to not allow teams to change out tires from what was proven to be a dangerous compound didn’t seem very flexible. Obviously, it all worked out, well, except for some who went over 100 laps on tires on Sunday (Robby Gordon), discovering the tires full tolerances.
During a Sirius XM radio interview with the PR guy from Goodyear, who was fielding questions from satellite radio listeners, dude, it’s one thing to say “That’s a good question” to a few folks, but he pretty much said that to everybody
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Fox Sports NOT Saying Nationwide
I presume it’s a conflict of contracts, but anyone notice that rather than saying the Nationwide race, they call it Saturday’s race? I’m sure the folks behind Nationwide, who have dropped a pretty penny on being the race series sponsor, must love that.
I wonder what’s up with that?
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Jennifer Jo Cobb
On the Nationwide side of the weekend, aside from the tire issue for both series, Jennifer Jo Cobb walked away from her ride with the No. 79 team of 2nd Change Motorsports prior to the race start.
Seems that the team really wanted to save the car for next weekend and she was instructed to start and park, plus found out that though she expected to have a ride the next weekend, it seemed she didn’t. Despite being the one who bought the tires, she made a stand saying she had an obligation to her sponsors to run a full race.
It’s an admirable stand, but taking stands only hurts one’s long-term potential within any system.
As it stands, she’s parted with the team and may have herself a short-term fix. A lot more went on beyond the simple words here, and you can read [ nascar ] for the details.
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The Jeff Byrd 500
Despite the tire woes and having to adapt to how the new tires made their cars handle, it didn’t seem to be a bad thing. Everyone had at least one practice session on the tires and changes were made.
There were only a couple of mishaps that included more than one car, but in the end, Kyle Busch swept the weekend at Bristol, having won the Nationwide race yesterday.
That’s his fifth-in-a-row win at the track across all series. Second consecutive in Cup, It’s his track.
The top 10 finishers were
- Kyle Busch
- Carl Edwards,
- Jimmie Johnson,
- Matt Kenseth,
- Paul Menard,
- Kevin Harvick,
- Kurt Busch,
- Greg Biffle,
- Kasey Kahne &
- Ryan Newman
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Dale Earnhardt Jr. finished 11th. So far he seems to be mustering up a revival season.
[ nascar: results_unofficial ]
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Carl Edwards
Through the course of this young season, Carl Edwards has been working hard at his image after the previous season of Brad-bashing & crashing. I thought he was trying hard to change, but a few post-race quotes in an interview has me questioning what I originally perceived this season:
Carl Edwards on not bumping out Kyle Busch in the closing laps.
“He still has one coming from Phoenix.”
“I still have one in my pocket.”
“I won’t let that happen again.”
That last one in reference to having Kyle within his reach to tap him out for the win, but then watching him pull away. I guess Carl will be Carl, no matter what. My prediction is that we’ll be seeing more of that one-sided Carl-World raise its head yet again this year.
I’ve dealt with persons who harbor a mentality like Carl’s and the ‘Boys have at it’ mentality isn’t going to work because Carl may start something, but when someone retaliates because they owed him, Carl will just retaliate to the retaliation as if that’s the first blow and he never started anything. We’ll see how this season pans out around Edwards.
Personally, I hop I’m wrong.
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