Oh boy. Where do we start? Texas Motor Speedway has been a problem child since about 2015. Back then, the issue was old pavement and drainage issues. The 2016 INDYCAR race being postponed because they literally could not get the track dry due to seepage issues led to the repave.
Technically, there isn’t anything wrong with what they did for the repave. It’s just that the track (and NASCAR) insisted upon the PJ1 TrackBite for the first race weekend there in 2017, then continued putting it down. The traction compound has literally ruined the place for INDYCAR and made it very difficult for the track to naturally widen out.
Now, the natural settling is causing problems with the Next Gen car. The bumps, combined with the rules for the Next Gen cars, seemed to be a contributing factor to what we saw.
Tire failures are going to be the biggest takeaway from the race. It was embarrassing to the sport and to Goodyear. However, it was also really hard to see just what was going on to cause these issues.
The only real idea of what could have been causing it was a shot on pit road of a blown out tire with a large bubble on it. Problem is, since the tire was blown out, you couldn’t really tell if that had occurred due to the blowout or before it happened. If these bubbles appeared before the blowout, it would lend credence to a number of the vibrations that were reported on the broadcast. They would all make a lot of sense if you were driving over that bubble hundreds of times a lap.
The problem with that is the fact that there had already been a number of blowouts by that point. It was hard to figure out everything that was going on if you can’t really look at anything that hadn’t already failed.
Steve Letarte indicated on air that he thought that it was indicative of an internal failure as opposed to running over something or a setup issue (ex: excessive camber). That is in contrast to what Goodyear’s Greg Stucker told the assembled media in Texas after the race Sunday.
Regardless, as the race continued on, the failures became more and more common as the sun went down. The lightning delay really caused a lot of problems because it resulted in unexpected speeds as the track cooled down by 20 degrees.
It was to the point where Brad Daugherty was getting scared for the drivers. You never want to see a TV personality or a team owner (in the case of Daugherty, both) say that on-air. Let’s…
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