RELATED: Before and after: Watkins Glen repave

WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. — NASCAR Sprint Cup Series teams wrapped up a two-day organizational test Wednesday at newly repaved Watkins Glen International, emerging with better ideas of the challenges they’ll face when the series returns for the Aug. 4-7 race weekend.

Among those challenges: reworked curbing, a fast circuit and a harder-compound tire that has made grip elusive.

A total of 16 Sprint Cup teams — one permitted from each organization — tried to unlock the novelty of the $12 million resurfacing project, using a Goodyear tire that emphasizes durability at the expense of traction and wear. The rubber compound chosen is similar to that used July 9 at Kentucky Speedway, site of the Sprint Cup Series’ most recent race on a repaved track.

At Kentucky, the tire selection made for treacherous conditions in certain spots and made passing a delicate process. Though road courses don’t lend themselves to the multi-groove racing seen at several well-aged oval tracks, Watkins Glen might still be a tricky place to maneuver when the series reconvenes for the Cheez-It 355 at The Glen.

“The main thing we’ve learned so far is how hard the tire is,” said Jamie McMurray, driver of the Chip Ganassi Racing No. 1 Chevrolet. “It just seems to be no wear at all or lap time fall-off right now. This place didn’t ever wear tires like Sonoma, but it seems like the tire is pretty hard.”

Sonoma, the other road course where the Sprint Cup Series races, is a much more intricate circuit with qualifying speeds roughly 30 mph slower than at Watkins Glen’s open, free-wheeling layout.

The Goodyear tire compound designated for both the Watkins Glen test and the race weekend is the same used for right-side tires in XFINITY Series competition at Iowa Speedway. Those Iowa right-sides will be used at all four corners for the Sprint Cup event at the 2.45-mile road course.

Racing with a softer tire with more adhesion would potentially introduce the threat of excessive wear or blistering. It’s a trade-off that Sunoco Rookie of the Year candidate Chase Elliott says he’s willing to accept.

“I think a lot of it is just having a fresh surface like this, you’ve got to have a tire that’s pretty hard,” said Elliott, Hendrick Motorsports’ driver representative for the two-day test. “It’s fast, and to ask a tire to hold up, you’ve got to bring something that’s durable. It puts Goodyear in a tough spot, but I think they do a good job of trying to make the most of tough situations. There’s been a lot of repaves here lately and I know they’re working hard.”

David Groseclose, NASCAR’s lead tire engineer, said Wednesday that the benefits of competing with a more rigid rubber compound outweighed the potential drawbacks.

“As with all repaves — same thing as Kentucky — if you don’t have a hard tire, you’re going to blister them up,” Groseclose said. “The way that works is if you’ve got a soft compound and you use it, the soft compounds tend to retain heat. It’s just the nature of a soft compound. But on a repave, it’s not going to wear so that heat’s not going to be dissipated out of the tire. It has nowhere to go, so it stays in the tire, so that’s why it blisters up. That’s what we saw at Kentucky with the XFINITY and Truck Series.”

In addition to the surface itself, the track features new concrete for the rumble strips that border the circuit’s turns and run-off areas. Some drivers found the differences barely noticeable, but Kurt Busch discovered a distinction the hard way with an early Tuesday spin as he bounded over the apex points in the backstretch chicane on one of his initial laps.

“It’s a lot different,” said Tony Gibson, Busch’s crew chief on the Stewart-Haas Racing No. 41 Chevrolet. “Kurt’s like, ‘I’ve got to learn all the curbs again.’ The curbs over in the bus stop (chicane) are probably the biggest change. They’re way more aggressive, and they’ve tightened up, so it’s a lot tighter lane through there.”

Said Elliott, who will race here in Sprint Cup for the first time next weekend: “Some of the curbs may be a little different here or there, some a little rougher, a little smoother just depending on how they laid the asphalt in or however it worked. It’s as close as you could make a track from an old surface to a repave, for sure.”

Five Sprint Cup teams participated in a Goodyear tire test May 10-11, and another 16 were present for this week’s organizational test. For the remaining half of the field, the work toward finding the proper handle begins with opening practice on Friday, Aug. 5.

“If you get your balance right, it’ll be a no-drama,” Gibson said. “Man, I told Kurt earlier, ‘I’d hate to know I had to come here next Friday and hit the track for the first time and try to figure out these curbs and how much the race track has changed.’ It’ll be a handful in the short amount of time we get to practice.

“It’ll be interesting to see when we come back who has issues and who doesn’t. But it’s definitely going to be a plus to come and learn the race track, even if your car is not right or whatever, just getting here and getting behind the wheel and getting time on the race track is going to mean more.”

Pit notes:

— The full roster (in alphabetical order) of drivers and teams participating in the test: AJ Allmendinger (JTG Daugherty Racing), Ryan Blaney (Wood Brothers Racing), Clint Bowyer (HScott Motorsports), Chris Buescher (Front Row Motorsports), Kurt Busch (Stewart-Haas Racing), Kyle Busch (Joe Gibbs Racing), Austin Dillon (Richard Childress Racing), Chase Elliott (Hendrick Motorsports), Brad Keselowski (Team Penske), Michael McDowell (Circle Sport-Leavine Family Racing), Jamie McMurray (Chip Ganassi Racing), Casey Mears (Germain Racing), Brian Scott (Richard Petty Motorsports), Regan Smith (Tommy Baldwin Racing), Ricky Stenhouse Jr. (Roush Fenway Racing), Martin Truex Jr. (Furniture Row Racing).

— Casey Mears turned the fastest lap in the two-day test, which was divided into four sessions of four hours apiece. Mears pushed the Germain Racing No. 13 Chevrolet in the closing session to a best lap of 126.7 mph, a good bit slower than the track qualifying record of 129.491 mph set by Marcos Ambrose in August 2014.

— Brad Keselowski returned to the track Wednesday, one day after his severe, nearly head-on crash in Turn 1. He turned 74 laps over both sessions in a reserve Team Penske No. 2 Ford.

— Two teams — Furniture Row Racing (driver Martin Truex Jr.) and Circle Sport-Leavine Family Racing (driver Michael McDowell) — were absent from testing’s opening day, arriving in the Watkins Glen garage Wednesday in time for the two closing sessions.

— Wednesday’s final session was extended 30 minutes to a 5:30 p.m. ET close because of a nearly hour-long clean-up for fluid on the track. After Chase Elliott’s No. 24 Chevrolet suffered a broken axle, Clint Bowyer’s No. 15 Chevy ran over the part, damaging the car’s transmission.

— NASCAR XFINITY Series teams are scheduled to turn their first laps on the new Watkins Glen surface next Thursday. The NASCAR K&N Pro Series East will stage a support race the following day on the 2.45-mile course.

ANALYSIS: Potential XFINITY drivers for SHR

WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. — Stewart-Haas Racing’s rapid rate of expansion received another significant add-on Monday with the announcement that it will field a single-car entry in the NASCAR XFINITY Series next season.

To hear Tony Gibson — the team’s most veteran crew chief — tell it, the move serves only to strengthen an already flourishing organization.

“I think there’s a lot of plusses to it,” Gibson, Kurt Busch’s crew chief, said during a break in Day 1 of a two-day organizational test at Watkins Glen International. “Obviously, it’s a lot more work and it’s just something else you’ve got to keep track of as a company, but I think in all, when you weigh out the pros and cons, there’s a lot more pros.”

The main positive to potentially emerge is the creation of a farm system for developmental drivers and crew personnel. On Monday, SHR said that the driver and sponsor lineup for the XFINITY Series campaign would be announced at a later date.

But for Gibson, the benefits extend beyond having a feeder system to cultivate the next star with his or her name on the windshield. It’s about developing all the parts and pieces that boost performance as well.

“You look at all these guys that are real successful on the (Sprint) Cup side like Penske and Gibbs, they learn a lot from their XFINITY programs,” Gibson said. “I know their drivers talk really highly about it, especially not so much on the car side of it. When we go to these race tracks where something’s changed or we’ve got a new tire, it helps those guys learn more about the tire and what it does throughout a run. That part’s a huge gain, but also it lets you experiment and bring up younger crew chiefs and crewmembers and the pit-stop side of it is huge.

“I’ve said the whole time that my guys on the 41 (team), they do way better on Sunday when they do the XFINITY car or trucks on Saturday. It seems to warm them up and they’re in that right frame of mind come Sunday.”

RELATED: Big moments in Stewart-Haas history

Stewart-Haas co-owner Gene Haas indicated in Monday’s news release that expanding into the XFINITY ranks had long been in the works. It’s the latest stage in the evolution of the group that he formed with owner-driver Tony Stewart ahead of the 2009 season. In the years following its debut as a modest two-car Sprint Cup outfit, SHR grew to a three-car operation for 2013 and reached the NASCAR-mandated four-car maximum the following year.

But the winds of change have turned gustier of late. Early this year, as Haas was preparing to expand his racing reach a first season in Formula One, SHR announced that it would switch its manufacturer affiliation from Chevrolet to Ford in 2017. Add the birth of an XFINITY Series entry to the mix and it makes for a busy stretch ahead at the team’s Kannapolis, North Carolina, headquarters.

Gibson said it’s a tricky balance to strike, forging ahead with progress while doing the best to buoy this season’s efforts with three of the organization’s four drivers virtually locked into Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup playoff berths.

“It’s difficult whenever you do that because you want to be the best at both,” Gibson said. “But right now as far as me and the rest of our guys, the four teams we have right now, we’re just focusing strictly on this year. We have a lot of resources there that are working on projects going forward. You have to do that. You have to structure it or you’ll burn everybody out and then you lose them. Keeping the guys focused on what we’ve got to get done this year is more important.”

RELATED: Shop for NASCAR gear

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — This race weekend at Pocono Raceway marks the first anniversary of the Fanatics Trackside Superstore — the reimagined and improved at-track shopping experience. The Trackside Superstore offers fans a one-stop-shop every race weekend with the largest selection of in-store NASCAR merchandise in the world — bar none.

Halfway through 2016, photo finishes, side-by-side racing and record passing as the Chase spots are clinched has not only driven interest in the telecast and engagement on digital and social, but also in driver merchandise sales. NASCAR fans take pride in flying the colors of their favorite drivers and the first-half merchandise sales results are officially tallied. The top three drivers are no surprise with Dale Earnhardt Jr. leading the rankings, followed by six-time Sprint Cup Series champion Jimmie Johnson and defending champion Kyle Busch.

With rising stars like Austin Dillon, Kyle Larson, Joey Logano and Sunoco Rookie of the Year contenders Chase Elliott and Ryan Blaney, there are currently five drivers in the top-20 list that are 26 years of age or younger.

With six top-five finishes and two poles this season, Elliott continues to be one of the top three drivers in sales increases each race weekend and ranks fourth overall in full-time driver sales. Elliott’s sales have nearly quadrupled in his rookie year, making him the youngest driver in NASCAR Sprint Cup Series history to rank among the top-five in trackside merchandise sales. Also up from last season is Blaney, who is now a top-20 selling full-time driver and has more demand than ever racing in the iconic No. 21 Wood Brothers Ford Fusion.

“I see more fans wearing No. 21 gear than ever before and it’s cool to see them cheering on our team,” said Blaney, driver of the No. 21 Ford Fusion. “There is nothing like seeing someone wearing your shirt or your hat and knowing they bought that because they are a fan.  And the Trackside Superstore makes it an easy, one-stop shop for everyone to find your gear. It’s been a great addition to our sport.”

With its flexible footprint, Fanatics has capitalized on defining moments from Kyle Busch, Martin Truex Jr. and Tony Stewart — all with positive sales trends in 2016. Kyle Busch also experienced substantial gains of nearly 80 percent in sales since his comeback last summer and subsequent championship run.

The most popular products available at the Trackside Superstore include apparel, headwear and novelty items. Lionel’s 1:64 scale die-casts are up 77 percent year-over-year, one of the largest growth trends across all categories at the Trackside Superstore.

The NASCAR Sprint Cup Series will hit the track this weekend at Pocono Raceway for the Pennsylvania 400 on Sunday, July 31 at 1:30 p.m. ET on NBCSN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio and MRN.

Top 20 driver merchandise sales rankings

Concord, N.C. (July 26, 2016) – John Wes Townley received medical clearance earlier today to resume racing in NASCAR and ARCA. He will compete in this weekend’s NASCAR Camping World Truck Series and ARCA events at Pocono Raceway.

Townley had been sidelined for the past four weeks while being treated for mild concussion-like symptoms.

“I’d like to thank Parker Kligerman, Cole Custer and Brady Boswell for filling in for me,” Townley said. “I feel great and I’m looking forward to racing at Pocono this week.”