Elton Sawyer: NASCAR "Baffled" with Lack of Tire Wear at Bristol

After the Spring event at Bristol featured drastic tire wear, NASCAR was puzzled when the Bass Pro Shops Night Race didn't produce the same.

Elton Sawyer, Senior Vice President of Competition for NASCAR, says the sanctioning body was "baffled" by the lack of tire wear exhibited in Saturday's Bass Pro Shops Night Race. / Photo Credit: Tyson Gifford, Racing America

Last Saturday's Bass Pro Shops Night Race at Bristol Motor Speedway played out in a drastically different way than anybody expected, based on notes from the track's Spring event.

Kyle Larson was untouchable in the third NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs event of 2024, leading 462 laps during a race that featured small traces of tire degradation if any.

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That outcome contradicts just about everything the NASCAR Cup Series drivers and teams saw in the Food City 500 at Bristol in the Spring, to the point where if you watched the two races back-to-back, you would think they were at different racetracks.

Needless to say, the events of Saturday's Bass Pro Shops Night Race left everybody, including NASCAR, pretty confused. At least that's what Elton Sawyer, NASCAR's Senior Vice President of Competition, said when he joined SiriusXM NASCAR Radio on Tuesday to talk about Bristol.

"We're baffled, to be perfectly honest," Sawyer said. "We felt like that we had a recipe there from the Spring that gave us what we're looking for in our short track racing, putting the tire management back in the driver's hands."

In March, NASCAR Cup Series drivers were forced to back it down dramatically over the course of a tire run, in order to avoid a cliff in the tire fall-off that would cost drivers multiple seconds on the stopwatch.

"We've seen some great racing throughout the year," Sawyer added. "Richmond comes to mind. Watkins Glen, just a week ago with great tire fall-off. The anticipation as we rolled into Bristol, was that we would see something very similar. Obviously, we didn't see that as the weekend started to unfold."

In terms of a visual comparison, the major difference between the Spring and Fall event is that the concrete racetrack in Bristol, Tennessee didn't take rubber in March, whereas last weekend, it did take rubber, expanding to multiple competitive grooves of racing.

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"What we didn't have is tire wear. We'll dive into that with our meetings today with our folks at Goodyear to see what maybe they have been able to come up with over the last couple of days in their meetings. Obviously, we were disappointed as a company for our fans. Those are things we'll learn from and we'll figure out what happened and get that corrected as we go forward."

As far as the path forward for NASCAR, Sawyer says the sanctioning body will be working hand-in-hand with Goodyear to figure out exactly what made the difference, so that they're able to develop a solution and execute it, to help enhance the NASCAR Cup Series' short track racing.