What Goodyear wants the tires to do at Bristol NASCAR

The weather forecast for the NASCAR Cup Series race at Bristol on Sunday might make this point moot, but Goodyear has made a tire that will lay down rubber no matter what even if it's cold.

The Last Great Coliseum has had two of the last four races where the tires wore out quickly because the track surface didn't hold rubber. Because of this it just tore up tires and drivers had to be very careful to make sure their tires lasted more than 40 laps.

That's one end of the spectrum. The other end is a track that takes rubber, but because it's rubber on rubber through the concrete pores, the other two races didn't have a lot of fall off and were very procedural.

On Tuesday morning, Justin Fantozzi, Goodyear's Director of Racing for the Americas, said on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio that the company has been working hard for most of the past year to get rid of those two extremes.

"We always start with the last race and look back over the last few races,"

"for Bristol, and we know that the chaos needs to be there," Fantozzi said. "We know that excitement needs to be there." We just need to lower the level of stupidity a little bit. The real problem with Bristol has been the change in the weather from Saturday to Sunday.

"So we wanted to get rid of some of that temperature sensitivity. We tried it out in November when it was pretty cold. When we got there in the morning it was in the 40s. We wanted to be sure we could put rubber down when it was cold. So we were ready for a cold spring or a cold fall night. That was the first goal.

"I have a lot of faith in what the engineers have planned for this weekend's event. We did the same thing a few weeks ago with the March OEM wheel force test. "We're ready to rock this weekend," we said.

Fantozzi also wanted to know how Goodyear made a tire that would lay down rubber even when it was cold.

Fantozzi said "The most important thing is the concrete." We know that the grip of concrete changes when it gets warm and cool. So how it's going to grab and hold on... the surface is going to grab and hold on and that grip factor changes when the temperature changes.

"It's just like chewing gum. You know that the bubble gum will behave differently when it's cold than when it's hot. So we thought about that. We've done it at other tracks before. When we think about repaves we remember that we would test at night in Kansas because it was too hot during the day. You should make sure that you have that temperature in a window that you think you will race at. We made sure to go back to Bristol in the morning in November, when it was very cold, to make sure we took care of business.