Race Weekend is too late
The drivers showed up for practice and qualifying nervous about the slippery surface that caused Stewart and Biffle's problems to find that all the rubber has made it very, very fast. Practice was during the day so teams were hopeful that the tire problems that they saw during practice will go away under the cooler night time race conditions.
When the Busch race on Friday night was a disaster everyone knew that Saturday night's NEXTEL Cup race was also likely to be a mess. But by that time Goodyear disn't have time to make 3,000 new tires that all 43 teams need. Clearly NASCAR couldn't cancel the race. Honestly, what was anyone to do that late in the game?
The Future
Before this weekend's event Bruton had already announced that he was going to re-pave the entire track surface before next May's events. This repaving may even include some changes to the banking to include the variable banking such as Homestead Speedway has.
Goodyear has their engineers looking at the tires. You can bet that they won't get caught short again with the same issue.
NASCAR has a long history of taking a hard lesson like this and learning well from it. During the race all they could do was mandate tire pressure. I wouldn't be surprised to see mandatory tire pressures baked into the rule book to reduce the chances of this happening again.
Sometimes bad things happen
This was a bad situation for everyone involved and remains as a black eye for NASCAR. This track is in the heart of NASCAR country, the race is right in the center of the Chase for the NEXTEL Cup and was on network television in prime time. If it's going to go bad it just can't get much worse than this.
Who could have prevented this from happening? At what point in the process did someone make a bad decision? Bruton Smith was trying to fix something that drivers had complained about for years based on a process that had worked at other tracks. Goodyear had the best tire based on the information they had. Everyone did the best they could.
This was a case where a series of events cascaded and quickly become an avalanche. By the time it hit, it was too late to stop it. Don't blame NASCAR, Goodyear or Lowes Motor Speedway. Sometimes, despite everyone's best efforts, bad things happen. Lets learn from it and get back to racing.
