By David Morgan, Associate Editor
NEWTON, Iowa – Iowa’s partial repave was the talk of the NASCAR Cup Series garage area coming into Iowa Corn 350 weekend, but after Friday’s lone practice session, tires have become the main concern.
By the time all was said and done, more than a handful of drivers had issues with their tires being unable to cope with the mix-and-match between the old and new Iowa pavement.
Noah Gragson finished the 63-minute practice session at the top of the board with a lap of 22.828 seconds, 137.988 mph, in his No. 10 Stewart-Haas Racing Ford.
“With it being a new repave it definitely created some challenges and a guessing game coming into this race, but I felt good on the Ford Performance simulator and it felt really close to how we unloaded in real life,” said Gragson. “We were just a little loose and got better throughout the practice. I started pretty loose in, but once we got that under control it felt like the car had a lot of speed and then came into the garage.
“Obviously, it does have a lot of pace, so I’m really excited to see what we can do with it here for qualifying. There’s still a long way to go this weekend, but the car feels pretty good and everybody on this Bass Pro/Winchester team has been working hard.
“We’ve kind of been in a slump the last four or five weeks since Darlington, but we’ve got a really fast race car and continue to work well with each other and it’s a good place for us to try and turn it around.”
Ty Gibbs was second fastest after being the first driver to have issues with his tires. Early in the session, Gibbs cut a tire on his No. 54 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota, but luckily did not hit anything and was able to limp his car back to the garage. His team was able to bolt on a new set of tires and send him back out on track, where he posted his fast time.
“It just seemed like it went down,” Gibbs said. “There’s not really any telling about what happened. We made some setup adjustments that are probably going to help that out, but didn’t really know anything about it until it went down.”
Alex Bowman finished the session third, followed by Justin Haley, Chase Elliott, Ross Chastain. Harrison Burton, Denny Hamlin, Austin Dillon, and Chase Briscoe to round out the top-10.
Shortly after Gibbs had his issue, his JGR teammate Christopher Bell, who ran the tire test at Iowa a month ago, ran into problems of his own. Bell posted the…
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