Tires color Indy black with dust, yellow with cautions (cont'd)

"I think we did everything we could do to give 'em a good show under the circumstances. Hopefully, next year we can figure something out coming back to this place. Hopefully, we can all learn from it. I'm sure Goodyear is going to do everything they can to make the next outing and every outing better.

"I said it before and I'll say it again: I think they're between a rock and a hard place on trying to make good tires for some of these races with these cars at these racetracks. It's a tough call and some other people have tried and they've failed, too.

"I don't think you need to be shooting a lot of arrows at Goodyear until you've walked a couple miles in their shoes."

Everyone acknowledged that NASCAR's new car, with its higher center of gravity that creates a greater weight transfer to the right-side tires and thus greater stress, is a challenge.

"Well, let's look at it this way -- it's fair to say we won't do the same thing next year we did this year," Pemberton said. "And it would be fair to say everybody will put their best foot forward and try to do a better job.

"But we've also been here 15 times, all right. And in 15 times, the only other problems that we've had is having to really regulate low tire pressures and make sure the teams didn't beat the tire up -- we're 1 for 15 in the loss column.

"That coupled with having a new car; that coupled with people didn't think we were going to need to test here. You know, everybody's got a little skin in the game here. I think everybody knew that -- the teams knew it, we knew it [and] Goodyear knew it.

"I think that's why you saw everybody working together on pit road [Sunday], in the tower and in the Goodyear building, to do everything we could to manage the tire, put on the best race we could for the fans.

"So, you know, we've got one time we didn't do the right thing. We tried to put our best foot forward and make the best judgment calls that we could getting prepared for this race. For sure, it didn't come off the way we wanted it to."

Also
• Out of final pit first, Johnson wins Brickyard 'competition'
• Tires stamped for Pocono brought to Indy, on stand-by
• Teams get extra set of tires because of extreme wear