NASCAR Hall of Famer Richard Petty had a major problem with this past Saturday’s Cup Series race at Richmond Raceway. From the moment the green flag was thrown, Petty said that drivers and teams were focused on tire strategy and not actually “racing each other.”
Petty wanted to see the fastest cars running up front at Richmond. He doesn’t believe that’s how the race played out.
“When they throwed the green flag, everybody said, ‘OK, what are we going to do on tires.’ Not, ‘What are we going to do racing each other?’ … The big deal is when they run a race, I like to see the cars that are the fastest, up front racing,” Petty said, via Petty Family Racing on YouTube. “Not because of strategy, but because the driver and the car got to go race each other and not wait on how you make a pit stop or when everything falls.”
NASCAR and Goodyear brought the same tire combination used at Bowman Gray Stadium, Martinsville Speedway and North Wilkesboro Speedway earlier this season. The right-side tire was the identical “option” used at Richmond last season, while the left-side tire was slightly softer. This particular combination was introduced at Martinsville last November. It was designed to create significant fall-off over the course of a run.
That it did as we saw throughout 400 laps of short track racing under the lights. Austin Dillon and the No. 3 team played the tire strategy to perfection and won the race.
Richard Petty did not like what he saw at Richmond
Petty, however, didn’t find much enjoyment in the race. He accused Goodyear of “trying to please somebody” and “wasting their time” trying to develop new tires.
“From a spectator standpoint, you’re sitting in the grandstand and no way you can follow all that stuff,” Petty said. “… I think somewhere it’s the drivers and most likely not the owners, NASCAR or the TV or whoever, is telling Goodyear and they’re working their butt off trying to please somebody. Really, they just need four or five kinds of tires and run them the rest of the year. With that much fall-off, it just really kills the race.
“If it’s just a second fall-off over a period of time, everybody can adapt to that particular deal. But when you run a tire, and it falls off a second. And then all of a sudden it quits… that just ruins everything. Goodyear’s trying to please somebody, and they’re spending a lot of money and doing a lot of research. I think they’re wasting their time because it really messes up the racing.”
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