Denny Hamlin reacts to surprise tire wear at Bristol, suggests areas for improvement

Goodyear’s new right-side tire wore out significantly during Saturday’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Bristol Motor Speedway. The tire fall off and how quickly it happened might have been a “little too much,” Denny Hamlin said.

Yes, the industry asked for this, and Goodyear delivered. But drivers and teams were unsure how this new softer tire would react after it didn’t show much wear the day prior in practice. Hamlin was “grateful” that Goodyear found a tire that could wear but going forward, he wants to see the left-side tires have more grip.

“Maybe it’s a little too much. You want it to wear out, and it did,” Hamlin said on Monday’s Actions Detrimental podcast. “I’m very grateful that they found what to put in a tire to wear it out, now put that at many other racetracks if you could, if you don’t mind. I still don’t understand why we can’t get left-side wear; it’s all right-side. There’s such disparity with our tires to where if they do wear, it’s all right-side and there’s nothing on the lefts. It’s like, man, if you give the lefts a little more grip to hold the car, you could run the same right-side tire because it’s using that energy to pull the car around the corner. You’re not just relying on the right sides alone to carry the car around the corner.

“So, just transferring some of that grip or load into the left sides I think would be a good change. But overall, they delivered on what we wanted, which is more tire wear.”

Tire wear was the story at Bristol

Bristol was a struggle for drivers, who were forced to manage their tires throughout the 500-lap race. The tire fall off was so extreme that NASCAR issued another set of tires to the teams. Multiple cars caught on fire due to excessive tire rubber buildup.

But the product of a new tire that had extreme wear was a race which featured lead changes, frequent passing and comers and goers. The race was well received by fans, evident by it earning an 80.6 in Jeff Gluck of The Athletic‘s good race poll.

Hamlin found it to be a compelling race. The only issue he found was that he couldn’t run hard at all without being “toast the rest of the run.”

“You want a tire to be able to go if you want it to go. I could never make it go. I knew if I went hard for two laps, I was toast the rest of the run,” Hamlin said. “You typically would want a tire where you can go if you want, but you’re going to pay a little bit on the back side; it was you can’t go at all. If you look at the lap times, we all went at the very beginning of the race. Some of the fastest laps were like 15.5s. If you look at every run after that, everyone just starts slowing down more and more and more just to try to conserve life.

“Even cars that were trying to push it couldn’t go quick anymore. It’s maybe a little aggressive… it was very, very good, very compelling, lots of passing, lots of contact. Could you make it better? Sure, it’s a hard job to do, but my advice would be to put some more grip into the left-side tires to take the loads off the right to give the rights a little bit of a break.”