What NASCAR wants from tires for Bristol races, explained

The racing product at Bristol Motor Speedway during the NextGen era has been a bit of a philosophical tug-of-war and the races since 2022 reflect that back-and-forth.

The turning point was the spring race in 2024 where cold temperatures prevented rubber from being laid into the track, resulting in tire shredding from 30-to-40 laps, and one of the most fondly remembered races from this era.

So Goodyear has been tasked with replicating it, something they hadn’t been able to accomplish until Saturday night, creating a product very much in line with the race that started this entire conversation in the first place.

Per NASCAR, Saturday night featured the most ever passes throughout the field in a race at Bristol. For the sake of recent comparison:

Spring 24: 3589
Fall 24: 2287
Spring 25: 2197
Fall 25: 3873

That spring ’24 race still has the lead change record but again, Saturday night was even less random than its archetype.

Spring 24: 61
Fall 24: 2
Spring 25: 4
Fall 25: 30  

Nevertheless, some people both within the sport and in the fandom loved it and some hated it. There were mixed opinions after the race when Motorsport asked a variety of crew chiefs and competition directors about it. Rudy Fugle was SiriusXM NASCAR Radio on Monday and effectively asked the question ‘what is NASCAR trying to do’ so a day later, Cup Series managing director Brad Moran answered the question.

What is the goal here?

“Again, everyone has opinions on what is a good race, what is a competitive race,” Moran said on Sirius during his weekly segment on the Morning Drive. “There’s a lot of crew chiefs that enjoyed the race. There’s some that would not have enjoyed it. The way they are wired, they like to know everything and it certainly went off the script a little bit, which usually means we had an exciting race but we want tires to wear out. We want big passing numbers. We want different leaders throughout a race, and I think most people want that.

It’s a real science to get all of that put together exactly how it should be but we certainly want some tire management and two and three wide racing. I think we got all that. Goodyear has worked hard to get us there. If it was just a slight bit less wear might have been favorable but no doubt we are heading in the right direction. Short track people wanted more action-packed short track racing and we delivered that on Saturday.”

A negative byproduct of the softer tires and the feathery marble build-up around the track is that three cars had their right fronts catch fire. It’s been largely an issue with the Fords during the NextGen era and three Ford drivers in Josh Berry, Austin Cindric and Chad Finchum suffered such fires on Saturday.

“We do not like fires as you can well imagine,” Moran said. “Over the last couple of years, we have seen some fires and that’s part of the development, it’s part of having softer tires. We’ve done plenty of things to change it. We’ve put slits in the bottom of the rocker (panels), we’ve got rocker fans that get air on the panels. We’ve mandated a left side debris shield for everywhere other than superspeedways … so we’re always changing things on the car to prevent the fires.

“The right-side fires were a bit of a surprise on the 21, 2 and the 66 and we’re going into a meeting shortly here with all of our engineers … We’ll gather all that information and make a decision on whether we are going to change it or not for this week coming up. We’ll have some internal discussions to see if we need to make some changes.”

Lastly, a week removed from NASCAR having to give warnings about drivers going off-road through the dirt after the race to add weight in advance of inspection, drivers drove through the apron and against the wall to pick up marbles for the same reasons.

NASCAR is not going to get involved in policing it at Bristol.

“It’s been going on for years,” Moran said. “We don’t tell them where to go after the race. We’re not going to tell them what line to run. We can’t police it that way nor do we want to. That’s been commonplace at many different tracks. … The track is all theirs.

“If they take a different line coming down pit road … Take a race like Bristol, there was debris all over the place on the entrances to pit road. We’re not getting into that business for sure. We certainly don’t want teams off-roading. The teams were notified of that. We don’t want that going on after the race but we’re not going to tell the teams and drivers where to drive on the race track on the way to pit road.”