Hard tires, aggressive drivers a volatile mix

CONCORD, N.C. -- Jeff Green's crumpled racecar sat in the rear of the Nextel Cup garage area, littering the concrete with fluid. Jeff Burton's car rolled back onto the track with a large piece of plastic covering its collapsed rear end. And Jeff Gordon's vehicle was towed in by a wrecker, its front end smashed and left side bent in from a vicious T-bone hit.

Fireworks erupted in the longest event of the NASCAR season long before the sun went down, with 19 different drivers caught up in array of accidents spanning the first 78 laps of Sunday's Coca-Cola 600. The Lowe's Motor Speedway garage was a triage unit before the field had completed even a quarter of the 400-lap event, with crews making desperate attempts to fix wrecked cars and drivers seeing their hopes dashed before dinnertime.

Lap-by-Lap

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The most prominent was points leader Jeff Gordon, whose run of seven straight top-four finishes ended when he made contact with the car of Tony Raines on Lap 61. Gordon's No. 24 car slammed the wall, and was broadsided so hard by the onrushing vehicle of A.J. Allmendinger that it bounced into the air (watch video). Prior to the accident, Gordon had completed every lap on the Nextel Cup circuit this season.

Gordon's crash came one lap after the field had restarted following a 13-car pileup, which started when contact between Allmendinger and Jimmie Johnson sent a tire tread flying off the No. 48 car (watch video). It was a volatile mix: a hard tire compound, a slick racing surface, and too many drivers too eager too early in the event.

"It's a 600-mile race," said Gordon, who was uninjured. "It's hot and slick during the day like this and with these tires, and it just makes it very hairy. You've got to be careful. I see guys driving way over their heads too early in a 600-mile race, too early for any race. That's why we've seen some of these incidents, and that's why I got caught up in that one."

At one point, so many cars were in the garage that the speedway's scoring pylon showed just 12 numbers. Some, like Johnson and Tony Stewart, survived with only scrapes and were able to get back into contention. Others, like Burton and Juan Montoya, limped back onto the track after major reconstructive surgery, many laps off the lead.

Why was it so crazy, so early in a race where many wait until the nighttime portion to make their move? "These tires aren't very good," Allmendinger said. Greg Biffle, who went out on lap 46 after a blown tire sent him into the wall, agreed.

"I hate to talk bad about anybody or bash anybody, but I just have to tell you that I think we have the worst tires in racing, period," he said. "Nobody can drive these things. They're so hard. Nobody can race side-by-side. It just doesn't put on a good race. We need to soften the tire up, use some technology and get downforce or horsepower out of the cars. Whatever it takes, to where we're not doing stuff like this. The tire is just so hard that it just does that for a period of time and blows out."

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."