Goodyear took back eight right-side tires that it had assigned to teams, believing that they came from a possible bad batch that could have resulted in some of the tire problems Sprint Cup teams had Thursday during the Gatorade Duel 150-mile qualifying races at Daytona International Speedway. The tires were replaced Friday, according to a Goodyear spokesman. Goodyear Director of Race Tire Sales Greg Stucker had said earlier in the day that the company was trying to figure out what had happened in a couple of the instances. Overall, Stucker said prior to practice Friday that he was”pretty happy” with the tire wear so far this week.(SceneDaily)
UPDATE: After Ryan Newman, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Mark Martin had problems in the 150-mile qualifiers, Goodyear noticed that portions of their tires in question were all manufactured on the same day. So Goodyear took back the eight tires that had the same components made on that day as a precautionary measure. Results of any tests wont be known until next week, said Goodyear general manager of racing tires Stu Grant. No other tires will be mounted for the Daytona 500 on Sunday that came from that batch, Grant said Saturday morning at Daytona International Speedway.”It looked like either a tire that blistered and kept blistering or a tire that was severely worn,” Grant said.”It looked a little more severe than some of the other ones. It looked different enough that its why we looked at the sequence numbers and see if there was anything common there. We noticed a common processing date for one of our manufacturing components.” The teams were not doing anything excessive with the setups, Grant said.”Everything we know is circumstantial right now,” Grant said.”You look at it and you say you have the same common processing date for these tires, so lets get them back and be sure.”(SceneDaily)(2-14-2009)
