Tire Issues Plague Chaotic NASCAR Cup Championship Race Practice

What an inauspicious start to the battle for the Bill France Cup. In the first on-track activity of Championship weekend for the stars of the NASCAR Cup Series, the story quickly shifted from the speeds of the Championship 4 contenders to a rash of tire failures.

Ty Gibbs, who continues to seek his first career NASCAR Cup Series victory, led the way in single-lap speed in the session with a 27.300-second (131.898 mph) lap time. Gibbs would pace the session by a margin of 0.096 seconds over Ryan Blaney, who narrowly missed out on advancing to the Championship 4 with a runner-up finish at Martinsville Speedway a week ago.

Austin Cindric, Ryan Preece clocked in third and fourth-fastest, while Denny Hamlin was the fastest Championship 4 contender with the fifth-fastest lap time in the session.

Hamlin, who was the fastest Championship 4 contender in the session and is attempting to secure his first career NASCAR Cup Series championship this weekend, experienced some issues with the clutch in his No. 11 Toyota Camry XSE. In his Championship 4 media availability, Hamlin's crew chief, Chris Gayle, said that the team is trying to wrap their heads around what is going on with the clutch in the No. 11 machine.

"Yeah, I don't know much about it now, other than the throw was a little off, and he's having a hard time with it disengaging just because the throw gets so long, it won't disengage," Gayle explained. "We're looking into it now. I don't know anything more about it right now."

Early in the session, Chase Briscoe, who is competing in the Championship 4 for the first time in his career, suffered the first of many tire failures among the 38-car field. After turning 10 laps on track, Briscoe suffered two flat tires on the left side of his No. 19 Toyota.

After practice was over, Briscoe's crew chief, James Small, hypothesized that he and a few others were a little too aggressive with their setups heading into Friday's practice session.

"Too low on air, too much camber. Just too aggressive, I guess," Small said. "You saw it with a number of cars out there, so, don't know if it's been resolved yet. We stopped running there. We had a little bit of a scare at the end. We made a lot of changes through the session, so, yeah, we'll have to look at it more, break these tires down and see."

Briscoe would complete just 24 laps in the session, as he also suffered a vibration while turning laps with his second set of tires in the session. Overall, it was a rough start to the championship fight for Briscoe, the driver of the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota. But Briscoe found the silver lining in the situation.

"It could have been worse," Briscoe said in a post-practice interview on TruTV.

Throughout the remainder of the session, Christopher Bell, AJ Allmendinger, Daniel Suarez, Kyle Busch, and Riley Herbst all suffered flat tires. For Allmendinger and Herbst, the flat tires sent them into the outside wall, which ruined their primary race cars.

While Hamlin was able to avoid cutting a tire down, unlike his teammates Briscoe and Bell, he did suffer a vibration toward the end of his run on his initial set of tires in the session. And while it seems the session was relatively drama-free for Hendrick Motorsports' two championship contenders, William Byron and Kyle Larson, as they didn't suffer from cut tires in the 50-minute practice, each driver did encounter a scrape into the outside wall.

Goodyear has done an impeccable job of creating softer tire compounds throughout the season, which has resulted in an improved on-track product at several tracks on the schedule, but there's a worry that the tires that the manufacturer brought to Avondale, AZ, are possibly a little too soft for the desert heat.

We'll have to see if crew chiefs are able to minimize the tire issues throughout the remainder of the weekend, but after Friday's practice session, there will potentially be a lot of worrying throughout the NASCAR Cup Series garage. But Briscoe's crew chief, who suffered a flat tire on Friday and is attempting to win a championship, doesn't feel like tires will be a problem on Sunday.

"I'm not worried one bit," Small said.

If Small is bluffing, he has a pretty good poker face.