Teams get extra set of tires for race due to tirewear

NASCAR on Saturday afternoon gave its Sprint Cup teams an extra set of Goodyear tires to use in Sunday's Allstate 400 at the Brickyard, in response to extreme tire wear in the first day and a half of track time at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

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The track is very abrasive because we don't run on it very often -- we don't test here. Goodyear's doing the best they can [but] it's a situation we do see probably every time that we come here.
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ROBIN PEMBERTONTeams were initially given nine sets of tires for Sunday's 400-mile race, but as Saturday's final one-hour practice began, NASCAR's vice president of competition, Robin Pemberton, said teams would get a 10th set.

Indianapolis, a relatively flat 2.5-mile oval with turns banked nine degrees, was last repaved in November 2004 and the track was "diamond ground" in spring 2005; creating a particularly abrasive surface.

NASCAR had already allowed teams two extra sets of tires for practice and qualifying -- eight instead of the usual six -- and Pemberton said teams could save tires from practice to give them more new sets for the race.

Penske Racing crew chief Chris Carrier almost has the best of all worlds, as his owner, Roger Penske, has a record 14 victories in the Indianapolis 500; while the driver of his No. 77 Dodge, Sam Hornish Jr., won the 2006 Indy 500.

But Carrier, who kind of summed up the garage area's concerns, said he didn't envy Goodyear its task in developing a tire for this course.

"The problem is that you have a [3,450] lb. racecar with a lot of horsepower that doesn't handle real well going around a 2.5-mile track that has flat corners with an abrasive surface," Carrier said. "Asking anybody to build a tire and come to this place and run two days of practice for a 400-mile race with the weight of these racecars, horsepower and amount of load is like asking somebody to invade Russia with a loaded shotgun.

"It's pretty hard to do [and] everybody is concerned about it."

A NASCAR spokesman said the sanctioning body would have a planned "competition caution" within the race's first 20 laps to check tire wear.

Goodyear has a new tire combination at Indy, with a softer left-side compound. The tire company has 3,150 tires, equally divided between left-side and right-side tires. The package was developed in an April tire test conducted by Dale Earnhardt Jr., Kurt Busch and Brian Vickers.