Johnson wins a depressing Brickyard 400

Well folks, I don’t know what to say. In my mind yesterday’s NASCAR Sprint Cup race, the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard held at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway was one of the most that was one of the most pitiful races I ever watched. Sure, Jimmie Johnson had a great car and captured his second Brickyard win along with the 48 Lowe’s team, but what I saw yesterday was definitely not a race. If you were living under a rock yesterday and missed the race, you were probably one of the lucky ones. The tires that Goodyear brought were totally terrible; they couldn’t even last more than ten to 15 laps before blowing out. The tires looked the same every time they were pulled off with the cords showing due to severe wear. The rubber wouldn’t even stick to the track instead it became dust that blew away in the wind. This pathetic race was just mind blowing, but now everyone wants to know who is to blame?

The finger of course was pointed towards NASCAR and Goodyear for not handling the tire situation in a logical fashion. The first mistake that NASCAR made was not to have an open test at Indy this year like they do every year instead they only had a little tire test in which they only invited three teams to participate. They could have also used a different compound come race time, but they decided to stick with unreliable tire.

NASCAR VP of competition, Robin Pemberton said after the race on Sunday to Autosport.com that many of the solutions thought of wouldn’t help out one bit. "I think when you have an open test things like that have already been decided," Pemberton said. "I don't think an open test here would've done enough for us, it wouldn't have helped, I don't think.

"You may have had enough issues that you'd have gone back and redesigned the tires, but I don't know if we could've gone with that in time. Hindsight is always 20/20, I think we'll just learn from this experience and try to do a better job next year."

Other people tried to blame the abusive track surface at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the problems that were occurred on Sunday, but Pemberton denied that as a cause for the problems, instead he thinks that racing with the Car of Tomorrow for the first time at Indy may have caused the issues.

"This isn't the first time we've raced here with the surface the way it is, and in the past we've been able to accomplish what we need to accomplish," Pemberton said. "So to pick on the surface wouldn't be fair. I think the new car, and probably not having a test here, probably didn't help us at all. You can say that surface is abrasive, but we have been able to accomplish a full fuel run here in the past."
"We have to anticipate where the tires and the competition are going to meet on Sunday afternoon," he added. "We have challenges when we develop tires here because you have such a dramatic change in surface grip as the track rubbers in. You can make everybody happy on Friday, miserable on Saturday, and really miserable on Sunday, or you can come back and work best at trying to achieve the right grip when it comes to Sunday afternoon."

Pemberton also believed that not having any support races at Indy was the cause to the problems either.

Problems pushed aside a few good things did happen on Sunday, A.J. Allmendinger got his first career top 10 in NASCAR Sprint Cup competition, getting he and his Red Bull team ever closer to the top 35 in owner points. Elliot Sadler and Jamie McMurray got their best finishes of the season finishing 4th and 6th respectively. And with Johnson’s win Hendrick Motorsports got their first win of the season that didn’t involve fuel mileage, (with the way race was run, fuel mileage wouldn’t have been a factor anyway). The Sprint Cup Series moves on to Pocono where they and fans like I will hope that the memories of this race will disappear like a bad television series.

NASCAR to learn from tyre debacle [Autosport.com]