WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. -- Minutes before Friday's 11:45 a.m. ET Sprint Cup practice for the Centurion Boats at The Glen was scheduled to open, a downpour that had threatened the area around Watkins Glen International all morning struck.

It cast the entire day's schedule into question, as rain tires have not been an option for Sprint Cup Series teams on road courses since 2006. And until the Cup Series' schedule was settled, several Nationwide Series crew chiefs said their practice status couldn't be determined.

Sprint Cup Series practice and qualifying were ultimately canceled at about 2:30 p.m. with qualifying rained out for the fourth time in the last five years. NASCAR vice president of competition Robin Pemberton said that, despite those statistics, too many factors weigh against using rain tires for Cup events.

"When you run a companion race, like here at Watkins Glen, Cup has precedence over Nationwide," Pemberton said. "So if we rain out Saturday and Sunday and we race on Monday, Cup gets it first; and Nationwide could be here one or two extra days they don't need to be.

"There are a lot of things that go into it, but the current thinking is that Cup should be on the next clear day, and that it would take precedence."

Even though Goodyear's specially grooved wet weather tires -- which were used for the first time in a national touring series event last weekend in the Nationwide Series race at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal -- could be used if necessary for that series' events leading up to Saturday's Zippo 200, they were not on Friday. Rain continued until about 1:30 p.m., and the scheduled 1:45 start time for the first Nationwide practice passed. At least one car, owner James Finch's No. 1 Chevrolet, sat in its garage spot on rain tires.

Goodyear has 600 rain tires, or 150 sets, on site at Watkins Glen for the Nationwide cars. Goodyear's marketing manager for the Sprint Cup Series Rick Heinrich said that, due to the tires' construction, in ordinary wet conditions a single set could be used for an entire 200-mile race.

"It's a little heavier tire and a little stiffer construction," Heinrich said of the rain tires. "Typically a slick tire would have 3/32nds of an inch of tread rubber, and no grooves, and the rain tires have 6/32nds of tread rubber with grooves."

While slick tires create grip by generating heat, Heinrich pointed out that rain tires' groove patterns, which are designed to disperse water to the outside of the tire, enabled the tires to be used on any corner of the car, but that they had to be mounted facing in the correct direction.

"The idea is to keep as much of the [tire's] contact patch hooked up to the racing surface as possible, versus hydroplaning," Heinrich said. "The aqua-channels that are designed into the tread pattern are directional, and it creates a pumping action that pushes the water to the side as it rolls down a wet racetrack. If it's mounted in the wrong direction [as Scott Pruett's Ganassi Racing team almost did at Montreal], it would push the water to the center of the tread and create hydroplaning."

Heinrich said the rain tires used in Montreal were produced in 1999, and were stored in a climate-controlled environment that would prevent their deterioration. After using rain tires at Montreal, there was a good supply "in inventory" to replenish the stock for WGI.

"We shipped in right around 300 additional tires to bring our inventory back to the 600 level," Heinrich said. "We were pleased with how they worked in Montreal, and we got good feedback from the teams. We feel like, given the proper conditions, that they would work equally as well at Watkins Glen."

Making history

Ron Fellows put his name in the record books as the winner of NASCAR's first points race run on grooved Goodyear rain tires.

• Fellows wins on rain tires
• Aumann: Tires a success
• H2H: Rain tires all the time?
• Experiment gives high hope

Goodyear's first version of Cup rain tires, which were hand-grooved slicks, were created for NASCAR's exhibition events at Japan's Suzuka Circuit and were used there in 1997, the second year NASCAR ran there before moving to the Twin Ring Motegi oval for one try in 1998.

Rain tires were used for an official Craftsman Truck Series practice at Watkins Glen in 1999. At the 2000 Cup event, NASCAR offered drivers the opportunity to test rain tires in an unofficial session and several took them up on it, including Mark Martin, Robby Gordon, Todd Bodine and Jeff Burton. Dale Earnhardt also tested the tires at The Glen, but they were never used for an official Cup practice.

"At the time we designed and built these tires, we had quite a history in Indy car and sports cars," Heinrich said.

A provision to use a rain setup was in Cup entry blanks until the 2007 season, when it was dropped. But the decision was never made to attempt it.

Pemberton said NASCAR opting to use rain tires in the Nationwide Series was a simple choice.

"When you look at the Nationwide side, it's about logistics as much as it is anything," Pemberton said. "It's about being in Mexico and having to get to the next race weekend, when you have a Sunday event [the road race in Mexico City]. It's about getting people in and out of that country and the schedule being so tight.

"I think if you look at everything we do to put on a race, whether it's rain or shine, there are some fans that can stay until Monday or Tuesday and wait for the next clear day, and then there are some that can't. So while they're all here, we put on the best show that we can under that set circumstances. You could say that it would be a better race in the dry, but if you're racing in the dry with 60 percent of your fans here, is that better? It's a toss-up and you can look at it a lot of different ways, but we just chose to run in the rain and we've had the plan to do that for quite some time."

Pemberton said his view of Montreal was "mixed."

"We're basically flying blind right now and the only way you get better is to practice, to do it and adjust and learn from something," Pemberton said. "We took a lot of things for granted, like some of the guys' taillights worked better than others. There's some equipment that's better and some of the teams did a better job with it [than others]."

Many Nationwide teams that were checked at Watkins Glen said they had better defoggers and wiper systems than at Montreal. Jason Leffler said his Braun Racing team had windshield wiper assemblies mounted both inside the driver compartment as well as outside on the windshield.

Pemberton said learning on the fly was business as usual for NASCAR.

"Here's my opinion on it," Pemberton said. "You can say it's a work in progress and you can say you learn as you go, and some people that want to be real critical will say you should do better and you should know that [already]. But the bottom line is, we learn as we go every day, at every race. We do things differently today than we did two years ago -- or a year ago. Everywhere we go, there are things we pick up on and we do better in all aspects of running the race, and the guys with the racecars. Every time we run a race and we see some circumstances arise that we couldn't predict and didn't know would happen, we go back and say, 'Let's fix this' -- and that's under dry conditions."

Pemberton said running in the rain was the same, and he stressed that "it's something that's tough to test for, because you don't load up when it rains and go to the airport runway and run up and down.

"At the end of the day, what's the difference if you run a two-minute lap or a 90-second lap?" Pemberton said. "It's still a race. It's about the competition."

Pemberton equated learning how to run in the rain with the introduction of radial tires, when teams discovered using previously unseen rear camber improved tire grip, but resulted in large numbers of broken axles.

"It's just something new," Pemberton said. "Some people will stand up and applaud, some will stand up and shout about how bad it was, and some people will stand back and look at it as an experience and do better the next time around."

“

On the Cup side, if you do that, it has to be a situation where there is no other option. We could probably find another option, but it is a great opportunity in the Nationwide Series to try to learn from it.

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DALE EARNHARDT JR.

But this weekend, it's not an option for the Cup Series. Pemberton did say that the sanctioning body would continue to evaluate the tires' use in the Nationwide Series and that using them in the Cup Series was not a dead issue.

"Never say never but never say always [either]," Pemberton said. "I think we'll always consider anything. Knowing now that we ran a race in the rain, I think we'll sit down as a group and discuss the potential of doing that and the nightmare of doing that and see if it's worth it or not. It goes into our 'learn as you go' basket, and we'll take that and see where we're at."

If that decision were made, it would take extra work for Goodyear to create the tires for a Cup application. Heinrich said the Sprint Cup tire for NASCAR's new car had a greater circumference than the tire used on the Nationwide cars.

"We don't have a rain tire to match that circumference," Heinrich said. "So it's really only a viable option for the Nationwide Series."

He added that the tires produced in 1999 -- that were individually inspected before being loaded on the trucks to be brought to the racetrack -- had about reached their effective lifespan and that, in the offseason, "we're going to be rebuilding the rain tires and have a new, fresh batch that we'll be bringing to the appropriate events in 2009."

Dale Earnhardt Jr. is entered in this weekend's Nationwide race, and he said he observed last weekend's race with some interest. He could wait to run rain tires on his Hendrick Motorsports Cup car, though.

"On the Nationwide side, it would be a lot of fun to give it a shot like they did last week. I think that Goodyear would obviously like to learn a lot more about the tire before we tried that on the Cup side," Earnhardt said. "On the Cup side, if you do that, it has to be a situation where there is no other option. We could probably find another option, but it is a great opportunity in the Nationwide Series to try to learn from it.

"Being the second-tier series, that is really where a lot of things are tested and a lot of trials and tribulations happen. It's a good series for that."