BRISTOL, Tenn. — In a matter of 28 hours, crew chiefs at Bristol Motor Speedway had to scramble through multiple plans for tire strategy.
Sunday’s Food City 500 was a straight-forward domination by Kyle Larson on Goodyear tires that held up just as well as these same tire codes did in September of both 2023 and 2024.
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That didn’t appear to be the case after Saturday’s practice session, though. Each of the two 25-minute sessions took place under overcast, cool conditions — and the tires responded differently, wearing to their inner cords within a 50-lap window, similar to the spring of 2024.
Suddenly, the crew-chief contingents’ well-baked plans, believing that last spring’s race was an anomaly, were in doubt. Engineers agonized overnight about different strategies and car setups that could better support a repeat of the tire wear that led to track-record lead changes a year ago.
But by Lap 50 on Sunday, those concerns were eradicated. The tires degraded at their initially anticipated rate, allowing teams to go the entire 125-lap first stage on the same set of Goodyears.
“If we had all bet our houses on it like we said we would, we would all be homeless based on our practice yesterday,” said James Small, crew chief of Chase Briscoe’s No. 19 Toyota. “We didn’t think it was going to be like that.”
Neither did his teammate, Adam Stevens, who sits atop the pit box for Christopher Bell’s No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota. Stevens told NASCAR.com it “definitely” felt like the strategy changed twice in one weekend.
“To be honest, I wasn’t expecting the high wear coming into the weekend,” he said. “Then we got it in practice, and I thought for sure we’d have it in the race and adjusted for it — and then we didn’t have it. So we — us as a team — were just one step behind the whole time, not optimized for the actual race.”
Nonetheless, the JGR foursome of Denny Hamlin (second), Ty Gibbs (third), Briscoe (fourth) and Bell (eighth) finished inside the top 10 despite the quickly changing circumstances.
Team Penske crew chief Jonathan Hassler used Sunday’s lack of tire degradation to his benefit, leaving Ryan Blaney and the No. 12 Ford out 30 laps longer than the leaders in the race’s waning laps in an attempt to gain significant track position. At one point, Blaney led the race on his own lap — trapping the whole field a lap down — which would have benefitted the No. 12 team tremendously if the caution flag flew. It didn’t, but Blaney still snagged a fifth-place finish on the day.
“Tires had really stopped calling off altogether, so it was really a minimal penalty for us to run long,” Hassler told NASCAR.com. “And it opened up the options for us. If we got a caution when we had everybody trapped a lap down, that’d be great. If we got a caution after our stop, we had ran long enough that I think those guys (who had already pitted) might come back for tires. So just kind of gave us some different options without giving up too much.”
Still, there lies a lingering confusion about the reasons Saturday’s tires wore out more easily and Sunday’s lasted for over 100 laps at a time. Track temperatures were notably higher Sunday as the sun directly hit the track’s high-banked concrete, but the PJ1 Trackbite was also reapplied to the bottom lane of the surface Sunday morning.
“One of the telltale signs was this morning, when they reapplied, it was incredibly sticky,” Small said, “whereas yesterday was not. It was very, very slick. Even after practice, even with temperature, it had very little grip. And we’ve seen here in the past, even with testing, when they’ve changed compounds and stuff like that, just a little bit more (PJ1) on the bottom can make a big difference. So I don’t know it was a combination of that, slightly increased temperatures — I don’t know. It’s a black box, so just leaving here as confused as ever.”
Significant tire wear or little tire wear, it didn’t seem to matter to Larson, who led 411 of 500 laps. That was no coincidence, not after leading 462 of 500 at Bristol last September and placing third in last spring’s tire-burner. A heaping portion of credit falls to crew chief Cliff Daniels, who had a good idea of managing either situation presented to him Sunday.
“To be honest, our learning experience from last year when it was the ‘chaos’ race was a well-balanced car was still going to give you the best potential to manage it on either side,” Daniels said. “So our focus yesterday in practice, even though we went really fast for what our run was and wore out our tires really quickly, it gave us a great read on the balance of the car and a couple of little things we could take into today, knowing that, either way the race could potentially go, we’re just trying to set ourselves up for the best opportunity for longevity, for pace, for Kyle being able to manage the runs with the tire degradation in mind.”