RICHMOND, Va. — It didn’t take long for the NASCAR Cup Series’ new-look race procedures, which featured two types of Goodyear tires, to have an influence on Sunday night’s event at Richmond Raceway. For Daniel Suárez and the No. 99 Trackhouse Racing team, it changed the trajectory of their whole race.
Suárez’s team was the first and foremost squad to reap the benefits of Goodyear’s red-lettered “option” tires, bolting on the grippier but less durable rubber at the start of Stage 2 in a successful bid to recover track position. The group ran out of the speedier tire when the event went to overtime, and Suárez slipped to a 10th-place finish, but the positives — the team’s first stage win of the year and a season-best 93 laps led — outweighed the offset.
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“Obviously, we had a couple of plans before the race, and that was one of them,” Suárez told NASCAR.com. “We knew that most people were going to put the option tires in Stage 3, and if everyone has the option tire, there is not really an advantage, right? So if we were outside of the top 10, we wanted to put them on earlier to gain track position and hopefully keep it, and it almost worked out like that. If it wasn’t for the last caution, I felt like we were going to finish with a stage win and probably in the top five, and we still finished in the top 10. So, it was a pretty good night. The guys gambled, were thinking outside the box, and I had a lot of fun passing a bunch of cars. So it was a good day.”
The debut of the two-tire compound format in a points-paying Cup Series race added another layer of strategy and intrigue to Sunday’s Cook Out 400, won by Austin Dillon in a slam-bang, overtime finish. Teams were allotted just two sets of the red-letter option tires for the 400-lapper, with yellow-lettered “prime” tires serving as the baseline. Every team in the 37-car field started on prime tires for the 70-lap first stage, where Suárez placed 15th after starting 21st.
Suárez’s No. 99 team was the guinea pig during the stage break, veering off from the strategy mold and lining up 16th for the restart on option tires. Michael McDowell’s No. 34 Front Row Motorsports Ford further back was the only other team to deploy the reds, setting up 29th after receiving the free pass to return to the lead lap.
Both teams carved through the field, and it took Suárez just 12 green-flag laps to pass Denny Hamlin to charge into the lead — “like Mario Kart with a star,” he said later. McDowell reached the top 10 after 20 laps, putting the short-term benefit of the softer tire compound on display for the rest of the field.
Suárez pitted on Lap 123 to complete a 42-lap run, reverting to the prime tires, but his newfound position among the front-runners was established. He rounded out a Stage 2 win, collecting a valuable playoff point as he enters the Cup Series postseason next month.
“We talked about ahead of time that for the reds to be a big advantage for us, we had to do something different,” No. 99 crew chief Matt Swiderski told NASCAR.com. “So our goal was to put them on when everybody else wasn’t on them, use that to get our track position. We knew it might bite us if there was a caution at the end, but it was the best play to get some track position, get back in the race. We were within a lap and a half of it kind of working out, but getting a stage win for us is big, too. So that was part of the decision, too.”
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Goodyear officials were also pleased with the strategy element, which was designed to spice up short-track races after a brief test at the NASCAR All-Star Race at North Wilkesboro Speedway in May. The effectiveness of the option tires began to fade near the end of Suárez’s run, and Goodyear representatives indicated that the softer rubber held up well for that 40- to 45-lap range.
“The option tire worked exactly as it was intended,” said Greg Stucker, Goodyear’s director of racing. “They fired off immediately and were more than a half-second faster than the prime, which is big on a short track. Also, the options gave up significantly more than the primes over a long run, as intended. At about the 25-lap mark, the lap times evened off, so the options proved fast early while the primes were strong on the long run.
“What was really exciting was how different teams used the option tire at different times to accomplish their own goals. For example, Daniel Suárez put them on early in the race and charged from the middle of the pack to take the lead, while Kyle Busch put them on at the end of Stage 2 to try to get a lap back. Overall, the primes/options tire set-ups highlighted the risk versus reward we were exactly looking for.”
The No. 99 team fastened its final set of option tires with 40 laps to go in regulation, briefly dropping Suárez back to 15th in the pit exchange before he mounted a charge into contention for a top-five result. That opportunity went away when a crash involving Ryan Preece and Ricky Stenhouse Jr. just before the white flag forced overtime; Suárez held on for 10th with fresh prime tires for the final two-lap dash, while others with a squirreled-away option set contended for the victory.
The net positives from the night, however, had Suárez in support of more applications for the two-compound tire format.
“In my opinion, honestly, we should do this everywhere. I mean, why not?” Suárez said. “Nobody had a tire issue. The tire didn’t blow up. It was fast, it fell off. I mean, imagine if we had this tire on a mile-and-a-half, or road-course racing. I mean, why not? I don’t think there is one negative of today’s race. It was exciting as a driver. I bet you guys loved it. The fans love it. More passing, more action. Why not? I think there was a lot of positives from today.”