NEWTON, Iowa – After two trips to the bumpy Iowa Speedway, Goodyear officials scheduled a tire test at the track in May. The two-day session provided valuable insight ahead of the NASCAR Cup Series’ return to the Hawkeye State.
Tyler Reddick, Austin Dillon and Noah Gragson took to the 0.875-mile layout, with Gragson being the first Front Row Motorsports driver to participate in a Goodyear test in multiple years. The No. 4 team used 23 different sets of tires, totaling four different compounds and three separate constructions.
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“That was huge for us,” Grant Hutchens, crew chief of the No. 4 Ford, told NASCAR.com on Saturday morning. “From a company standpoint, we’ve got a loose alliance with Penske, but there’s not a lot of data transfer. For us to just go test, it was a pretty big step to work out all the bugs, collect data.”
Throughout the different sets of tires tested, some featured extreme wear. Goodyear ended up returning the same right-side tire from 2025, but pairing it with a new left-side compound, designed to withstand the track’s high speeds and heavy loads while still promoting increased tire wear and fall-off.
“The short-track tires that we tested, everything behaved as we expected,” Hutchens stated before practice. “We did have to change the balance a little bit to be able to get it to drive good. Hopefully, that’s a step, but you don’t jump the fence and end up having a bunch of failures and get painted into a corner.”
By Day 2 of the May test, the preferred groove was painting the white line. However, a recent wheelforce test last month provided optimism that the tires will wear more throughout the course of a run than in the previous two visits to Iowa.
“I would guess we’re going to have about double the fall-off we had last year,” Hutchens added. “We saw in 45 laps, three-quarters of a second to a second, depending on which cars you were looking at.”
Saturday’s practice session, however, saw little tire fall-off, putting an added emphasis on track position entering race day.
One team that nearly perfected last year’s race was Brad Keselowski and the No. 6 bunch. Keselowski swept the opening two stages, leading 68 laps on the way to a podium finish when William Byron stretched his fuel tank to the checkered flag.
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With Iowa being the 11th race of the season using the 750-horsepower package, there are different factors entering this season’s race compared to last year.
“Obviously, the power change, but the tire is probably the biggest variable because we’ve run so many races with the new power,” Jeremy Bullins, crew chief of the No. 6 car, said. “You just look at how the race last year played out, and the strategy got interesting because we ran long at one point and the caution trapped a bunch of guys a lap down.
“That’s the kind of thing you find here. It’s a racey track, you can move around, and you will get some long runs, but you will get some strings of cautions as well. It just all depends on how the race plays out.”
A new stage-break procedure will go into effect this weekend as well, which could throw a curveball to teams. Should a yellow flag fall in the final 10 laps of one of the opening stages, that stage will be deemed complete and the same caution period will serve as the scheduled stage break.
While the magnitude of the change could be track-dependent, starting it at Iowa could play a wrinkle in strategy. The word interesting was used among both crew chiefs of the No. 4 and 6 teams.
“It will be a unique one,” Hutchens concluded. “I’m looking forward to that being a little bit of a difference, and maybe it changes up some of the strategies, too.”
Keselowski qualified fourth for Sunday’s Iowa Corn 350 (3:30 p.m. ET, USA Network, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) but wrecked entering Turn 1 on his second lap and will need to start the race at the rear of the field. Gragson will take the green flag in 15th, his best starting position of the 2026 season at a non-drafting track.