Hard tires, aggressive drivers a volatile mix (cont'd)

The tires used Sunday were so hard, that Kurt Busch went the first 115 laps on the same set he used to open the race. But to Gordon, tires were no excuse.

"If you've got a brain, you know that you don't race right now," he said. "You run your own race. There are just too many guys out there who aren't doing that. The tire doesn't make it easy, but it's just common sense right now. It's such a long race."

That aggressiveness was on display early. Allmendinger, fighting to get back on the lead lap, made contact with Johnson on Lap 53. Seconds later, as Johnson frantically waved to the drivers behind him that he had a problem, a tread separated from his left-rear tire and spun down the track. Cars piled into one another trying to avoid both the errant rubber and the slowing Johnson.

"It's one of those things where you don't want to fight with the leaders," Allmendinger said. "But you can see the lead lap in front of you, and there are two cars that are fighting. We've just got to start these races better. We're terrible when we start these races. We start so bad and just drop to the back every time, and it's just an uphill fight."

Allmendinger took responsibility for the incident, asking his spotter to apologize to Johnson's spotter, and relay that apology to his driver. "That does a lot of damn good," Johnson said when informed of Allmendinger's contrition over his team radio.

Crewmen with the Hall of Fame Racing team later identified a puncture in the right rear tire on the No. 96 car as the reason for Raines' slide. Tires continued to play a major role in the event -- a flat forced Dale Earnhardt Jr. to lose a lap, which he got back after Kurt Busch spun on Lap 185. A blowout on Lap 220 sent third-place Carl Edwards into a spin, igniting a wreck that collected David Ragan and Bill Elliott (watch video). Kyle Busch hit the wall after cutting a tire, and returned to the track 42 laps down.

NASCAR has mandated minimum air pressures at Charlotte since 2005, when the Coca-Cola 600 was plagued by a series-record 22 cautions, many of them caused by blowouts on a recently-smoothed track surface. Goodyear introduced one of the hardest tires it's ever developed for last year's May races at Lowe's Motor Speedway, a compound which slowed the cars but sacrificed grip in the process.

But grip is something drivers want, especially on a track as slick as Charlotte is before the sun goes down. As night fell, so did the number of teams suffering from tire problems. But that was too late for many drivers, who were resigned to watching crewmen pry bent sheet metal away from their cars.

"The tires are so hard, you can't do anything on them," Biffle said. "They make them so hard to slow the cars down, that you can't shed any heat off them. I don't know what the deal is, but they put the hardest tire in the world on, and you can't drive the racecars."