Talk about tires brings out some interesting details

LONG POND, Pa. -- I had an interesting discussion today with Stu Grant, the general manager of global race tires for Goodyear, about what happened in the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard last Sunday.

Grant and Goodyear issued a statement Saturday morning explaining the steps Goodyear will take to figure out what happened to the right-rear tires in the race at Indianapolis and its plans to see that it doesn't happen again. He then came on Sirius NASCAR Radio's "Press Pass," which I co-hosted with Steve Post, to talk about that release and about last weekend.

I was having a conversation with Grant on the radio and wasn't taking notes, but some of the things he said stuck with me.

For instance, he said Goodyear has looked at what went into the tires it build for Indianapolis and found nothing out of the ordinary. Grant said Goodyear has confirmed that the compound used this year was the same as the one used last year at the Brickyard. That means nothing was mixed improperly or left out of the process. Grant said Goodyear even went so far as going to the suppliers of the elements used in the tire construction process to see if those suppliers had changed anything from a year ago. Nothing out of the ordinary was found.

So if the tire was the same, the obvious next step is to figure out what was different. The clear answer to that is the car, since this year was the first time the "car of tomorrow" was used at Indianapolis.

What Goodyear has found so far is that drivers went into Indy's four 90-degree turns in a completely different way in this new car. Grant said drivers were pitching the car into the corner and then sliding the right-rear tire as they tried to get the new car to turn.

That's important because it basically changed the direction in which the tire was going through the turn. Instead of having the contact patch of the tire riding along with the grain of the grooves in the track's diamond ground surface, the tire was basically sliding across those grooves on the diagonal. Grant said that may be why the tire was turning into a fine powder instead of coming off in the kind of small pellets that would stick to the track off the previous car.

Goodyear is working with a company with expertise in computer modeling to see if the interaction between the tire and the track can be reconstructed in a model. Potential changes to the tire could then be tested in greater detail against that same model.

How do you make the tires react differently to the track?

Well, one idea could be to add something to the tire -- a resin, perhaps -- that would be stickier as it comes off the tire.

In the bigger picture, though, the solution could be making the tires bigger or wider (or both) so that it will hold more air. In general terms, the more air in the tire the more forces it can withstand. If you make bigger tires, of course, you have to made adjustments to the race car. So before Goodyear did that it would have to work with NASCAR and the Cup teams to make that work.

The one thing fans should know is that Grant never once tried to shirk responsibility for the problems at Indy. He said it's Goodyear's job as NASCAR's tire supplier to figure out how to build tires that will work on the car that NASCAR is now using in the Cup Series, and promised that's what the company will keep trying to do.