BRISTOL, Tenn. — Six NASCAR Cup Series teams participated in a Goodyear Tire test on a warm and muggy Tuesday at Bristol Motor Speedway, in preparation for the Bass Pro Shops Night Race, which runs on Sept. 21.
The challenging 500-lap race is the cutoff race in the NASCAR Cup Series Round of 16 Playoffs. Following the race, the Cup Playoff field will be trimmed from 16 eligible drivers to 12.
Goodyear conducted the test following a highly-competitive Food City 500 in March, where teams faced a different Bristol challenge and had to manage tire wear throughout the race. Denny Hamlin won the event.
The following drivers participated in the test: Former Bristol Xfinity Series winner Chase Briscoe, 2022 Night Race winner Chris Buescher, Bristol Xfinity Series race winner Austin Dillon, Justin Haley, Corey LaJoie and John Hunter Nemechek, who finished a career-best sixth in the Food City 500 this past April.
“Goodyear realized the PJ1 was very helpful for the tire and made it live a lot longer,” Dillon said following the test. “The resin that they ran last time doesn’t seem to let the rubber lay down and it just dusts up. Laying rubber down you can run longer runs. The tire felt fine and we had good lap times. The tire did fall off quite a bit. Over 30 laps it was almost a second, pretty good falloff. That’s pretty good, really. That’s falling off fast enough to where if your car is a little better than the next guy, you can kind of manage the tire and pass the guys in front of you.
“We started early at 9 a.m. today and temperature always plays a little bit of a factor, but we thought it would lay rubber faster because of the heat and usually when it’s colder it takes a little longer, and it didn’t happen. Goodyear and Bristol had to put the PJ1 back on it and that seemed to solve a little bit of the tire wear issue. You have to manage things. Extreme case was the last race here where you were running slower to make a 50-lap run, that was somewhat fun. It was different. If you told us that was going to happen we would’ve managed it better, but that’s what made it a pretty good race.”