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FONTANA, Calif. -- It was a race that saw one driver lead nearly three-fourths of the laps run, yet Sunday's Auto Club 400 provided some of the most entertaining racing of the 2016 season for NASCAR's Sprint Cup Series.
Even with the dominant performance of Kevin Harvick, who led 142 of the race's 205-lap total, there were green-flag passes for the lead and multi-car battles for position throughout the field.
In previous years, restarts had often provided the most excitement in the series, but once the field settled in, green-flag passing, particularly up front, had often been more difficult. Now, armed with a low-downforce aerodynamic package and forced to manage tires that wear appreciably during the course of a run, drivers find themselves having much more of an impact.
"Great racing; low downforce is obviously the way to go," said Joe Gibbs Racing driver Denny Hamlin on the heels of his third-place finish Sunday. "This package is obviously something that we can build on and I can't wait until we take another chunk of downforce out of these things.
"Really you're going to see some great racing. I love what we've seen so far and hopefully we're going to build on it."
Hamlin isn't the only driver to raise the subject of removing additional downforce. Others also say they believe taking more off the cars would continue to improve the product.
Not so fast says Steve O'Donnell, NASCAR's Executive Vice President and Chief Racing Development Officer.
"This is our rules package," O’Donnell said following Sunday's race at Auto Club Speedway. "Some teams do say that (and) some teams like where it is today. For us, we’re only five races in so we're satisfied with where the rules package is today; you'll see us continue that throughout the year and as we get toward looking at 2017 and look at any levers we want to pull, we'll do that together with everyone. But for now this is where we're at and we'll keep tweaking on it and allowing Goodyear to come up with that tire each and every race will be big."
Matching up the tires to the rules package has been crucial. Tire failures did crop up during Sunday's race and at least one driver, Kyle Larson (Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates), suffered a hard crash when the left-rear tire on his No. 42 Chevrolet failed. Larson was not injured.
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"Both the 42 (of Larson) and the 34 (Chris Buescher) were left rears that were over-stressed for whatever reason, whether air pressure or camber or both," Greg Stucker, Goodyear's director of racing, said Sunday. "We've seen signs of it all through the day up and down pit road but I think people are managing it when they see it. Every crew chief gets down off the box and looks at left-side tires; they know what they can do and what they can't, I think."
There were no surprises in the area of tire wear, according to Stucker.
WATCH: Stucker explains how to read a tire
"You know where they were during practice; we expected that they were going to be pushing it," he said. "A couple of guys hit pit road and thought they might have had an issue and they didn't. Might have been some early signs but think everyone was just being cautious."
The rules package and tire builds haven't been the only reasons for NASCAR's most recent competitive turn. Each track where the package has been utilized has been unique -- Auto Club is a wide, worn 2-mile layout; a week ago the series raced on the 1-mile of Phoenix International Raceway. It debuted at Atlanta, a rough, tough 1.5-mile track before moving to Las Vegas, another mile-and-a-half but one not nearly so worn.
In the meantime, teams have worked to regain the lost downforce, using whatever means available.
"Our job as teams is to build the best race car we possibly can," said Chad Knaus, crew chief for Sunday’s race-winning driver Jimmie Johnson. "We want to build the most downforce, we want to build the most mechanical grip (and) we want to build the most horsepower. He who does that wins, period. That's how it works, right?
"We have to try to do that on all levels. … We're going to do that to the best of our ability 100 percent."
It's been an impressive start for the series, competitively speaking, with four different winners in five races. Two races featured razor-thin .010-second winning margins (although one came in the season-opening Daytona 500 where the low downforce package was not used).
No one is giddy, but most are optimistic about what the future holds.
"I think overall, when we look at the start of the season, we said we would kind of get through the West Coast swing and take a look at it," O’Donnell said. "But we still feel like … certainly it's going in the right direction."