Tires color Indy black with dust, yellow with cautions

Weird" only began to describe the 15th Allstate 400 at the Brickyard on Sunday at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, on a day when tire issues created a 400-mile race in which the longest stretch of green flag racing was 13 laps -- once.

In what everyone connected with the event -- Goodyear, NASCAR and the competitors -- called a major miscalculation in the tire combination that was selected for the 160-lap event, NASCAR was forced to administer the race using a series of "competition cautions."

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Well, I think there was a lot of passing -- I know I had to pass a lot of cars -- so it had to be entertaining on television when we had the green flag.
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JIMMIE JOHNSONSix of the 11 cautions, which resulted in a total of 52 laps, or 32 percent of the race being run under a yellow flag, were artificial.

Goodyear's director of race-tire sales, Greg Stucker, said the company would keep working.

"We've got to really sit down and see [if the problem could have been prevented]," Stucker said. "Obviously, the tread wear didn't improve as we thought it would over the course of the afternoon [and] we don't have an answer to why that didn't happen, so we've got to go back and look at it and try to figure out how to make it better."

Obviously, the feelings of winner Jimmie Johnson didn't match everyone else in the field; but most of the 43-man field joined in offering support to Goodyear and NASCAR for a cautious approach to the day.

After the track showed no signs of absorbing rubber through the first day and a half of practices and qualifying, NASCAR and Goodyear decided to give teams an extra set of tires for the race, and then took the extra step of bringing 1,600 tires intended for next weekend's race at Pocono Raceway as a backup plan.

Those were never needed, but virtually the entire race was run on a razor's edge of suspense over the next tire problem, rather than the next pass for the lead. Johnson, though, was satisfied.

"Well, I think there was a lot of passing -- I know I had to pass a lot of cars -- so it had to be entertaining on television when we had the green flag," Johnson said. "I can honestly say nobody wanted to be in this position: Goodyear, NASCAR, teams, drivers, owners -- nobody wanted to be in this situation -- but it's the situation that we had.