Editor's Note: NASCAR and Goodyear, anticipating possible tire issues in Sunday's Allstate 400 at the Brickyard, had 400 sets of tires intended for use next weekend at Pocono Raceway brought to Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
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INDIANAPOLIS -- NASCAR on Saturday afternoon gave its Sprint Cup teams an extra set of Goodyear tires to use in Sunday's Allstate 400 at the Brickyard, in response to extreme tire wear in the first day and a half of track time at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

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The track is very abrasive because we don't run on it very often -- we don't test here. Goodyear's doing the best they can [but] it's a situation we do see probably every time that we come here.

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ROBIN PEMBERTON

Teams were initially given nine sets of tires for Sunday's 400-mile race, but as Saturday's final one-hour practice began, NASCAR's vice president of competition, Robin Pemberton, said teams would get a 10th set.

Indianapolis, a relatively flat 2.5-mile oval with turns banked nine degrees, was last repaved in November 2004 and the track was "diamond ground" in spring 2005; creating a particularly abrasive surface.

NASCAR had already allowed teams two extra sets of tires for practice and qualifying -- eight instead of the usual six -- and Pemberton said teams could save tires from practice to give them more new sets for the race.

Penske Racing crew chief Chris Carrier almost has the best of all worlds, as his owner, Roger Penske, has a record 14 victories in the Indianapolis 500; while the driver of his No. 77 Dodge, Sam Hornish Jr., won the 2006 Indy 500.

But Carrier, who kind of summed up the garage area's concerns, said he didn't envy Goodyear its task in developing a tire for this course.

"The problem is that you have a [3,450] lb. racecar with a lot of horsepower that doesn't handle real well going around a 2.5-mile track that has flat corners with an abrasive surface," Carrier said. "Asking anybody to build a tire and come to this place and run two days of practice for a 400-mile race with the weight of these racecars, horsepower and amount of load is like asking somebody to invade Russia with a loaded shotgun.

"It's pretty hard to do [and] everybody is concerned about it."

A NASCAR spokesman said the sanctioning body would have a planned "competition caution" within the race's first 20 laps to check tire wear.

Goodyear has a new tire combination at Indy, with a softer left-side compound. The tire company has 3,150 tires, equally divided between left-side and right-side tires. The package was developed in an April tire test conducted by Dale Earnhardt Jr., Kurt Busch and Brian Vickers.

"We can't change the tire [compound]," Pemberton said. "We always run through the same thing here at Indy [because] there's only one series that's here this weekend and you don't get a chance to rubber-in the track.

"If you make a tire that lasts during practices, when you get into the race [the teams] have issues with handling. It's always a challenge here. It's a one-off tire that Goodyear builds for this place.

"The track is very abrasive because we don't run on it very often -- we don't test here. Goodyear's doing the best they can [but] it's a situation we do see probably every time that we come here."

Goodyear's director of race tire sales, Greg Stucker, said teams had asked for more tires to practice with, especially after they experienced inordinate wear during Saturday's first one-hour session.

"I don't know if [tire wear] is more severe than last year -- we're probably five or six laps earlier on [to see cording] in the earlier practices," Pemberton said between Saturday's practices. "The track for some reason isn't taking the rubber right now that it had last year at this time, so the wear hasn't slowed, as we had hoped -- but we do have more tires for the race than we had last year."

"This car seems to be a little tougher on right sides," Stucker said of the findings in the April tire test. "Because it carries more weight and transfers more weight to the right sides.

"We came back with the same tread compound that we raced last year because it was a known quantity, but unfortunately everything we did to improve the wear, the handling penalty was there, of course.

"We felt like that penalty was a little bit too much to pay, so we stayed with that tread compound [on the right side] and went a little bit softer on the left to try to help with the wear on the rights."

Mark Martin said that in Saturday afternoon's first practice his No. 8 Dale Earnhardt Inc. Chevrolet team went through four of their eight available sets of tires; and that he couldn't get more than five laps from any of them before they "corded," or wore out to an unusable degree.

Near the end of final practice, Pemberton said teams were reporting running as much as 11 laps before their tires were used up.

Beginning with Friday's two practices, a total of two hours of track time, the track didn't "take" rubber as readily and it created a finer grain of tire fibers than is normally seen, and that created an issue with rubber shards clogging cooling passages and creating another issues for teams.

"There's a lot of concern right now," defending race winner Tony Stewart's crew chief Greg Zipadelli said of the amount of rubber debris that was getting into his No. 20 Toyota. "It seems to be worse than normal -- it's in every nook and cranny of the car.

"We've had to take everything apart and blow it all out to get all the rubber out of it. You want to open it up to give you more cooling, but then it just gives the rubber more places to go, and it packs the radiator [and hurts your cooling]. We've been blowing it out, but it's going to be there and we have to deal with it.

"But right now, I'd be a little concerned."

Carrier said right front tires would be his biggest concern.

"I can promise you, no matter what they do, the first time we try to make a gas run [Sunday], there are going to be some nervous people on pit road," Carrier said of a typical 25-lap fuel and tire run. "Right now, we're getting about eight or nine laps out of a set of tires and then the right-front is usually corded. On our Mobil 1 Dodge, we've only seen the right-front start to cord. We've seen a little bit on the right-rear.

"The left sides are fine. I think the right-front is going to be the one all the crew chiefs are going to be concerned with because it does the most work and has the most load. That's the tire that is under the most pressure and gains the most heat."

"We've historically seen, in the race that wear is going to be fairly heavy, early-on" Stucker said. "But by the end of the first stop or the second stop, everything cleans up. It seems like, all of a sudden, when you get all 43 cars out there at the same time the condition pretty well heals itself, and I feel like we should be in pretty good shape."

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