Words between Stewart, Goodyear expose a gap (cont'd)

Jeff Burton, Kasey Kahne, Travis Kvapil and Kurt Busch also participated in the tire test, which was held Dec. 12-13. Stucker, who said he was present as well, added that Stewart appeared to have no interest in being there.

"I was told that he was told by his team that he was to be there late," Stucker said. "He had other plans and that got changed, so he was at the test. But if he's not going to be more constructive than he has been recently, or was at that test, then no, he won't be at a [future] tire test. We look for people that want to be engaged, that can provide us the feedback, that can be there to do what we need to do."

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Stewart agreed that he didn't want to be there. "It was December. We had a long year. That's the facts of it," he said. "I didn't want to be in Vegas. I had to go out the day before, and we stayed two days to tire test. It was clear after the banquet. It was into our holiday season. That was three days I would have rather spent with my friends and family that I don't get a chance to see enough anyway. I actually had something else planned that I wanted to go do, and had to cancel it because of the test."

As for being left out of any future tire testing, he doesn't seem to mind.

"I don't like tire testing anyway," he said, far from alone in that sentiment. "It's more days out of our schedule. There's a reason that they have to do it, obviously, but the drivers, the teams don't really get anything for doing it other than taking two days out of their schedule and we can give them all the feedback that we want ... There are very few times that we give them our input and they actually bring back what we recommend, so it makes it frustrating to want to go try to help a company that doesn't take the input that you give them anyway and listen to what you have to say."

And there, at its essence, is the nature of the divide. Drivers understand the necessity of tire testing, but seem perplexed sometime at the results that come out of them, and wish their information was put to better use. On one hand, Jeff Gordon points out, Goodyear decides to go back to Darlington a second time because the results of this week's first tire test were not conclusive enough. On the other, he adds, their final tire test at Atlanta -- a track where the new car had yet to compete -- included one Sprint Cup car and one Craftsman truck.

"In my opinion, that wasn't enough," Gordon said. "It wasn't enough cars to put rubber on the track, it wasn't enough information."

Like many drivers, Burton is effusive in his praise for Goodyear, which he says correctly errs on the side of safety and has done much to raise the profile of the sport. But at the same time, he wouldn't mind seeing more people from the garage area being included in the decisions on which tire is used at which racetrack.

"In order for Goodyear to do a better job, we have to find a way to integrate with the teams more. We have to find a way to let the people that do it every day, that spend their whole lives on these racecars, become more a part of the process. We don't know how to build tires. We have not a clue how to build tires. Goodyear does a really good job of that. Goodyear could benefit from using the teams more than we actually are able to do now. That's my opinion," he said.

"We have to find a way to utilize tire testing better than we do now, to ultimately have a tire that is No. 1 safer, that's the main thing, and No. 2 is a better driving tire. I'm the driver that goes to Goodyear every three or four weeks and says, 'I don't care how they drive, make them so they don't blow out.' At the end of the day, if I have to make a choice, that's the one I'm going to choose every time. Can we do both? I don't know. But I do know that the teams are the ones that can help move the ball forward."

Goodyear believes they're already doing that.

"We take this very seriously," Stucker said. "We listen to what people have to say. We try to react to that, we try to react with the best information we have. That's why we're here at the racetrack every week. We do listen to these guys. We don't listen to just one. We try to listen to all 43. We still have to make a tire for all 43 of them. We also listen to NASCAR; we have a weekly conference call with them on Tuesdays and get their feedback on what happened the previous week, what happened with tire tests, what happened with open tests. There's a lot of information that we try to dissect and make the right decisions."

And then there's the question -- is it even the tires at all? Or did the lack of control the drivers felt at Atlanta stem from the characteristics of the new car, leaving Goodyear in an impossible situation?

"The bottom line is that the [new car] is heavier than ever," Busch said. "It has less downforce, so it doesn't turn as well, so you're scrubbing the right-side tires trying to get it to turn. And then you have to run all this built-in camber trying to help the car turn. You used to travel to make the front end go through a motion which would add camber as you travel or take away from the left-front. Now it's just built in the whole time. You're turning the wheel harder. You have all this camber. It's a recipe for tire issues."

Goodyear won't go out of its way to dispel that notion. After all, they've seen it before. Stucker remembers what it was like with the old car when NASCAR took away some downforce, and the tire manufacturer tried to compensate with more grip, and the setups began to put more and more stress on the rubber meeting the road.

"It's kind of a never-ending cycle," Stucker said. "We try to stay ahead of them, but these guys are very smart. They try to stay ahead of the curve as far as each other. It's what you do in racing, try and push the envelope. I don't know if you're ever going to find the right balance that satisfies everybody."

Maybe Bristol will give things time to cool. The concrete half-mile has traditionally been a good place for tires, as anyone who witnessed Elliott Sadler's victory in 2001 -- where he went 162 laps on old tires to win -- will attest. But then again, maybe not.

"I'll be honest with you, I question what [Goodyear] did here at Bristol," Gordon said. "They've got a new left-side construction compound and right-side compound that's never been tested here."

Stay tuned.