Tire Problems Were Best Thing to Happen to NASCAR

BRISTOL, Tenn. — Now that was a race at Bristol Motor Speedway, baby!

The Food City 500 on Sunday afternoon (March 17) not only was the best race at Bristol in years, not only the best short track race of the Next Gen era, but it may very well have been the best pure race of the past decade.

I was entertained from the drop of the green flag to the waiving of the black-and-white checkered. I was on the edge of my seat nearly all 500 laps.

And the huge factor that made this race so great was the extreme tire wear. Tires didn’t last much more than 40 laps before they started cording. Teams only got nine sets of tires. You do the math.

Goodyear did allow the teams to use one additional set of tires, but outside of that, teams had to make it work. And that made the race frickin’ awesome.

Because the teams had to make it work, drivers had to manage how much they were abusing the tires in order to make them last until the end. That right there is quintessential NASCAR.

NASCAR was founded as being the ultimate test of man and machine. Not only did the driver have to last the distance while being better than their peers, but the car had to hold up for the entirety. That was the case much throughout the first 50 years or so of NASCAR, but in the last 25 years, it had gone away. Cars became more durable to the point where now you have races where the entire field finishes sometimes.

All but one car held up in Sunday’s race, but the tires falling apart was a throwback to the days of NASCAR old. As race winner Denny Hamlin and his crew chief Chris Gabehart mentioned in their postrace presser, for once we had a race where the big thing wasn’t how well you air-blocked.

It was also a connector to grassroots racing. It’s common in late model racing around the country for a race to come down to tire management.

You notice who looked the best on Sunday? Hamlin and Gabehart have strong late model backgrounds, as well as Josh Berry and his crew chief Rodney Childers, who showed a lot of speed before ultimately finishing 12th. Martin Truex Jr. finished second — and his dad was a great grassroots racer.

Every lap wasn’t a qualifying lap, like NASCAR seems to have become in recent years. A driver could be aggressive and burn up his tires getting to the front, or he could be…