I think what the race fans and the competitors need to understand is that Goodyear puts a lot of work and effort into developing a good, safe, competitive tire for Winston Cup and all the other divisions. But, somewhere, the laws of physics have to take over. I watched the telemetry from some of the Busch cars Saturday and saw that they were only losing less than 10 mph in the middle of the corners. The corner speeds were almost as fast as the overall speeds. Goodyear keeps working hard at developing a tire for all of these tracks where the speeds keep escalating.
Speeds keep escalating because teams are working on power, aerodynamics, and the chassis.
It's almost like Goodyear can't keep up with what the competitors are doing. There are a lot of things that contribute to tearing a tire up. How the driver treats the tires in the first few laps of a run, something we've worked hard on with Mike Skinner, is a factor. The lower the air pressure you can run in the tire plays a role. Something else you didn't hear talked about a lot was that we've learned that the softer spring-wise that we can run the car, the better we can make it handle.