NASCAR insiders react to Bristol catching entire NASCAR Cup Series field by surprise

NASCAR Cup Series drivers and teams were caught off guard by how quickly Goodyear’s new, softer right-side tires wore out during this past Saturday’s Bristol Night Race. Those same tires did not show much fall off during Friday’s practice session, so you can imagine their surprise when they started cording almost immediately during the race.

Jeff Gluck of The Athletic added that he believes everyone in the industry went to bed Friday night expecting a normal Bristol race. What they got was something extreme, something reminiscent of the spring 2024 race.

“Unless I’m completely wrong, I think that every single driver, crew member, and crew chief and everybody, left and went to bed Friday night thinking, ‘No, this will not be an issue whatsoever.’ [No. 20 team crew chief] Adam Stevens said [he would have] bet his house this would not have been a tire wear race and 30 laps in, low and behold, tire wear race,” Gluck said on The Teardown podcast. “Unbelievable.”

Goodyear struck gold in the spring 2024 race, which saw 54 lead changes and 3,589 total passes under green flag conditions. Goodyear failed to replicate it in the following two Bristol races, but they figured it out — and then some — for Saturday’s Round of 16 finale. It appears the temperature, which was mid 60s throughout the race, made the difference.

The industry asked for a tire that would wear more, and Goodyear delivered. It didn’t take long for drivers to figure out this was going to be a tire wear race, Jordan Bianchi of The Athletic said.

Bristol tire wear surprised drivers, teams

“I went and talked to a bunch of drivers and talked to a bunch of crew chiefs. The question I asked every single one of them was, ‘When did you know that this was going to be a completely opposite race?’ And they all said, ‘We went into this race expecting it to be a typical Bristol race in terms of tire wear.’ So, not quite maybe to the level of what it was in the spring, but closer to that,” Bianchi said. “Then within about 20 laps or so, everybody basically realized oh, hell, this is not what we thought it was going to be.

“Actually, Denny Hamlin said that in retrospect, he probably knew on Lap 2 because of the way things were. Joey Logano knew fairly quickly as well. From the crew chiefs I talked to, they said they could see it on the timing charts and how the speeds were quickly not picking up or staying put. … Everybody knew pretty quickly, within about 30-40 laps, what this race was going to be like, and everything went out the window.”

The race was well received by fans, evident by it earning an 80.6 in Gluck’s good race poll. Bianchi was a fan of what he watched, calling it a “chaotic” and “dramatic” event.

“I’m cool with it, man,” Bianchi said. “This was good, this was fun. It was chaotic, it was dramatic, it was exciting, it was unpredictable. You had a lot of contact and physicality in this race because of the varying speeds. Some guys were saving tires, other guys were on fresher rubber trying to blaze through. This, in a lot of respects, was old school Bristol, you know? It was pretty good.

“Yeah, you could nitpick this and there’s some things we’ll talk about, but this is close to what it needs to be moving forward. Maybe not to this level, but we said on this show recently that if you’re going to go from the two extremes to what Bristol was in the spring to what Bristol is now, the direction you end up on needs to be closer to what we saw tonight.”