Stewart, Earnhardt think bad of Goodyear's tires

HAMPTON, Ga. -- The balancing act between safety concerns and competition that Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. faces each week was the post-race focus of several top finishers Sunday. It left both sides defensive and fans wondering what happened to the typical side-by-side racing for which Atlanta Motor Speedway is famous.
Tony Stewart, who finished second in the Kobalt Tools 500, and third-place finisher Dale Earnhardt Jr. were outspoken in their criticism for the tire compound brought to Atlanta. There were no tire failures reported during the race, but the two agreed that the harder tire made it almost impossible for drivers to run side-by-side. Only thirteen cars were on the lead lap at the finish.
"Goodyear doesn't like to hear people bashing them tires and I don't like doing it, but I ain't going to sit here and put up with this."
DALE EARNHARDT JR.
"That was the most pathetic racing tire that I've ever been on in my professional career," Stewart said. "... Goodyear can't build a tire that is worth a crap. If I were Goodyear, I would be really embarrassed about this weekend and what they brought here. It didn't keep us from winning the race and how we got to second, I don't know
Junior was more diplomatic in his criticism.
"I'll say that Goodyear Tire Company makes good racing tires, makes a safe tire," Junior said. "There's a lot of technology that goes into making the tires and I give them a lot of credit. It's a reputation-risk, just to be in this sport for a company like that, especially ... as far as criticism goes. They do a good job. This is just a bad combination. This tire at this track, it was just a poor combination Jeff Gordon finished fifth, and echoed the comments made by Stewart and Earnhardt.
"I felt like I was going to crash every single lap," Gordon said. "I'm exhausted right now. I feel like I've run a thousand miles here. That was the hardest day I have ever had at Atlanta, especially for a top-five finish. This car, this tire, at this track was just terrible."
Justin Fantozzi, marketing manager for Goodyear motorsports, defended his company's decision to bring a harder tire to Atlanta.
"I've heard what they said, "Fantozzi said. "To get into attacks in the media is not the right place. We're tremendously proud of the wear rates that we saw here. We had a defined development process for this particular tire. We started in August, with a development test here at Atlanta. From those wear rates and those data sets, we then made a recommendation for the open house test that was a different tire than we actually raced on here in October.
"Based on those wear rates not being acceptable, in our opinion, we then went back and did another development test here in December and then we made that recommendation for here."Fantozzi said as the official tire supplier for NASCAR, Goodyear is entrusted with making decisions that are in the best interest of the sport.
"We make tire decisions so that we can provide the safest tire that we know how to build at every racetrack," Fantozzi said. "As a supplier of the series, as a partner in the series, we work together but as the tire authority, they let us do our jobs."
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Still, Earnhardt wondered what NASCAR's top officials thought about the competitive nature of Sunday's race.
"There's a big difference between complaining and stating the obvious," Junior said. "It is what it is. It's not a complaint. I'm sure that Mike Helton or [Brian] France will say what their opinion is. They probably wouldn't like this any more than the drivers did.
"I don't think, for one, the race was all that exciting. We couldn't run side-by-side, or we'd wreck. We had to let each other go by. Every time you got beside a guy, you were just like, 'Take it.' I couldn't go into the corner side-by-side but nobody else could, either."
Fantozzi said tire company officials will analyze the data from Sunday's race before making a decision on what tire compound to bring when the series returns to Atlanta later this season.
"We'll do the same exact thing that we do every race," Fantozzi said. "We have a post-race data analysis meeting. We now have a new set of data and we'll go back to Akron and sit down with the engineers and go through the process again and see where that leaves us for the fall race.
"Driver comments are part of the data set. It's temperature, it's wear rates, it's driver comments, it's feel, it's grip, it's overall race pace. So we'll look at the overall data set and then we'll make that decision."
Not everyone was as adamant about the tires. Kyle Busch said running up front was a matter of staying patient and taking advantage of what grip you could find.
"I'm going to say that I didn't like it," Busch said. "But I just went out there, and we all had the same tire. They're going to pay somebody to win the race. And so that's what I focused on, was just going out there and try to be the one they were going to pay to win the race. I just drove the thing to the best of my ability.
"You could go the first four or five laps and really haul the mail -- well, the first two anyway -- but from there, you were just skating, sliding all over the place. You just had to be patient with it, slow it down, keep it on the bottom and pretty much just keep that left front right on that line and keep the thing turning in order to make it through the corner."
And crew chief Chad Knaus aimed the blame for Sunday's uncompetitive effort at a different target.
"You know, I think that's where everybody's wrong. It's not the tire, it's the car," Knaus said. "It's just the car. The car asks too much out of the tire. There's only five things that hold the car on the racetrack: That's the four tires and the downforce.
"The car has no downforce and Goodyear has to build an extremely hard tire just to make the tire live because there's no downforce on the car. That makes everybody bad-mouth Goodyear and it's just not fair to them, because Goodyear actually does a very good job."
Stewart said he hoped speaking out, which he did more than once at AMS , will perhaps force changes to be made.
"The reason we're talking about it and the reason that we're bringing it to everybody's attention is that we don't want to have to race on tires like we raced on [Sunday], every week," Stewart said. "This wasn't fun [Sunday]. There wasn't anything about [Sunday's] race that was fun for anybody. I ran second and I wouldn't re-run this race for any amount of money in the world. It was just that bad.
"We're pleading with Goodyear to do something about this, make it better. Do something to make it better for us so we don't have to run on tires that make it to where you can't run side-by-side."
Earnhardt agreed.
"Hopefully it was a good lesson learned," Junior said. "Goodyear doesn't like to hear people bashing them tires and I don't like doing it, but I ain't going to sit here and put up with this. And I don't think any of those other drivers or anybody is going to do it. Hopefully, we can all get along and come up with something better than this."