NASCAR teams leave Indianapolis and Sunday’s nightmare behind this week and travel to Long Pond, Pa., hoping for more fun than the Brickyard weekend offered.
But before hitting the road again, Robin Pemberton, NASCAR’s vice president of competition, held a news conference yesterday to deal with the fallout from Sunday’s problem-filled Allstate 400, where NASCAR officials and teams had to deal with tires that lasted only 25 miles before they wore out or blew out. That resulted in a flurry of caution flags that interrupted the flow of the race—the longest stretch of uninterrupted laps was 13.
“I’d like to let everybody know we’re going to work on it,” Pemberton said. “We’ve had a call with Goodyear this morning, talked to Joie Chitwood (the Indianapolis Motor Speedway track president). I can’t say enough how sorry we are—it’s our responsibility, being NASCAR, that we don’t go through this situation again.
“We’ve already got after it, and we’re moving forward with a plan to get ahead of the situation.
“The race didn’t come off like we had hoped; the fans didn’t get what they wanted; and we’ll do everything in our power that it won’t happen again, I can tell you that much.”
“There is nothing worse than coming away from a race and knowing that the result wasn’t even close. It wasn’t even close. It wasn’t even in the 25 percentile of what we’re capable of doing and what we do week in and week out.
“So I don’t feel real good about it right now.”
Pemberton said that he and others were unaware there would be any tire issues until Saturday evening.
“Our best guess, or Goodyear’s best guess, was it was going to take the same path it did in previous years, and it looked like it was headed in that direction on Friday,” Pemberton said. “Friday was not much different than past Fridays at Indianapolis.
“But Saturday the track didn’t rubber-in … and we were left with tires that only lasted 10 laps.
“We haven’t asked the speedway to make any such changes.
Pemberton said that a proposal that NASCAR establish its own testing team probably wasn’t a hot idea, because he said having the Cup teams do that testing would offer better results. In the Darlington tire test in April, even Jeff Gordon, one of those testers, said that if Greg Biffle hadn’t been one of the testers, too, that the real tire issues at that newly repaved track likely wouldn’t have been seen. If Gordon, one of the tour’s preeminent drivers, puts such a stark qualification on testing, it would appear to make the prospect of any NASCAR test team a moot issue.
“We’ve just got to do a better job with testing and come out with a better position on our tires.”
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