A crewmember for Michael Waltrip's No. 15 team prepares his Goodyear tires before a race. Credit: Autostock

Riding on the wings of Goodyear has a price

The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company is as much a part of NASCAR history as sunburn, chicken bones and racing back to the caution flag, but as a rule you don't hear much about them.

As exclusive tire supplier to NASCAR's top three divisions, the Wings of Gold are ubiquitous in their support and steadfast in their loyalty to motorsport's 800-pound gorilla.

The Akron, Ohio-based company produces around 70,000 racing tires for Nextel Cup competition each season, part of its annual racing tire production run of more than 500,000. Unfortunately, there is no breakdown on just how much it costs the company to build a racing tire for Nextel Cup use.

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"We don't really give that out," said Carole Swartz, manager of racing public relations for the tire giant. "The racing division's costs are wrapped up into our North American tire unit, and nothing is broken out on the cost of the business itself. All we have is the sale price of the tire, which is $402."

Taking that price times four is $1,608 per set of tires, just in tire costs. Of course, at tracks over 1 mile in length there are inner liners to be purchased at around $85 each, which adds another $340 to a set of tires at those tracks, plus valve stems.

The inner liners are re-usable, so you don't have to buy new ones for each tire every time out. All in all, according to team tire specialists, the set of tires that you watch bolted on to your favorite driver's car some eight to 10 times a weekend costs that team around $2,000.

Figure on an average of 12-15 sets per weekend -- the teams use three sets to practice and qualify on -- and you have an average of between $24,000 and $30,000 per weekend in tires for a single team.

A crewmember checks tire temperatures. Credit: Autostock

Swartz cautioned that the 70,000 tires Goodyear makes each season for the Nextel Cup Series don't all get sold. The tires are made to cover any exigencies of racing that might crop up from time to time. Also, some sets of tires, like those for Charlotte, Dover, Michigan, Fontana and Chicagoland, can be used interchangeably.

At the beginning of each season, Goodyear produces a book of tire codes for team tire specialists to use. These contain the "D numbers" for each tire Goodyear will make for each specific track that season. The D number, or tire code, is stamped upon the sidewall of each tire to tell teams its size, construction and compound.

Some tire codes can be used at multiple tracks. For instance, if a team has a set left over from Charlotte, that set can be used at Dover. Some short tracks, notably Bristol, requires an inner liner on at least one wheel. Up until this year, tires were also interchangeable at Daytona and Talladega, but no longer.

Another interesting aspect of Goodyear's relationship with NASCAR is the tire contract the company has with many teams. In days past, tires were part of the contingency awards program. The driver who won the pole earned a couple of free tires, as did the driver who won the race and others. Now, the contract dictates how many tires teams must buy.

"All of the teams buy a percentage of their tires," Swartz said. "Some more, some less. Some might pay for all of them. It's a rather complex program. This is a contract, and it is different on an individual basis." Some teams do not have a tire contract, and therefore must buy all of their tires.

In the NASCAR Busch Series and the Touring divisions, like Busch North and the West Series, there are performance-based criteria for getting free tires, and that practice is prevalent among some non-NASCAR series as well. But in Nextel Cup and Craftsman Truck it is no longer done.

A team's tire bill could be as much as $30,000 a weekend. Credit: Autostock

As part of the whole amalgamated financial whirlwind that is NASCAR racing, tires make up a sizable percentage of a team's weekly nut. Of course, lessons learned in this space earlier dictate that a team's tire bill is in the same general fiscal neighborhood as its hotel bill (around $15,000-$18,000) for the same period, so you can draw your own conclusions.

Goodyear used to be the only tire manufacturer involved in NASCAR, Indy Cars, Formula One, NHRA, sprint car racing, off-road and sports car racing, but the realities of world-wide commerce led the company to pull out of Formula One and the Indy Car ranks.

Since it was challenged by tiny Hoosier Tire in 1988-89 and again in 1994, Goodyear has been the exclusive tire supplier to NASCAR's top three divisions since 1997.

"NASCAR is our largest single customer," Swartz said.

The company builds the majority of its racing tires at its Technical Center in Akron, although some of the tires it makes for the lower rungs of NASCAR -- like the Weekly Racing Series -- are produced in Goodyear's Santiago, Chile plant.

If you'd like to learn more about Goodyear's racing operations, the company is rolling out a new racing-themed web site, http://www.racegoodyear.com/, in time for this weekend's Brickyard 400 at the famed Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

NASCAR.COM's business feature appears each Wednesday afternoon. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.