If it's Atlanta, it must be the tires

If it’s Atlanta, it must mean tire issues. Sunday’s Kobalt Tools 500 became a day-long procession to pit row for tire changes, which caused the majority of 10 cautions at 50-year-old Atlanta Motor Speedway Sunday. And as usual, there were track incidents aplenty.

For the second year in a row, Penske’s Kurt Busch stormed Atlanta like Sherman, enduring NASCAR’s race-end gauntlet of two green-white-checkered attempts to win the 325-lap affair that stretched to 341 laps in “overtime” around the 1.5-mile tri-oval.

Most troubled by the constant tire erosion on the abrasive surface were the Hendrick Motorsports cars. Of the HMS fleet, Jimmie Johnson finished highest at 12th, with Dale Earnhardt Jr., Jeff Gordon, and Mark Martin faring worse with their respective 15th-, 18th-, and 33rd-place finishes. Besides the strong-running Busch, Juan Pablo Montoya and Kasey Kahne also ran consistently at the front.

The race’s ending deteriorated with a spectacular crash with just two laps to go, when Carl Edwards chose to pay back Brad Keselowski for an earlier-race incident, in which Keselowski punted Edwards into Joey Logano on the outside lane on a restart. Both Edwards and Logano had to exit the track for lengthy repairs. Edwards, known to take no quarter, at the time of his wrecking of Keselowski was 152 laps down. Unfortunately, that incident brought to an end a terrific 25-lap stretch of green-flag racing that had fans on the edges of their seats, with Montoya reeling in Busch to within a half second in what was building to a nail-biter.

ROADSIDE RANTS AND RAVES: Only four races into the 2010 season and Goodyear just couldn’t stay out of the headlines. Of course, whenever you see Goodyear’s name in context with a NASCAR race it’s usually with a negative connotation for its product failure on the track the previous day. The tire giant even tested specifically at Atlanta Motor Speedway in the off-season, but yesterday you could almost see the old track laughing as it chewed up Goodyear’s best offering and spat it out like so much indigestible rubber…FOX’s Darrell Waltrip made a clairvoyant, you-gotta-be-kidding-me projection an instant before it happened Sunday, when he cautioned that David Ragan had better watch out for a cut tire after he had bumped the wall two laps before. A split-second later, almost on cue, Ragan cut a tire and barreled up the track into the wall…This week a news story circulated that Jimmie Johnson’s constant winning was becoming bad for the sport. Industry types surmised that possibly JJ’s winning ways were turning off droves of NASCAR fans. It was refreshing to hear one lone voice—Kyle Petty’s—say phooey to that. Petty believes dominance, if anything, spawns far more interest in racing. “Parity stinks,” he said with conviction. And I for one completely agree. NASCAR admits it has done everything in its power to level the playing field for all cars, yet huge gaps still exist between powerhouses and also-rans. It reminds me of the 1946-49 Cleveland Browns of the All-America Football Conference before that team became a member of the NFL. The Brownies dominated the AAFC all four years of its existence. Detractors screamed that Cleveland was killing the AAFC. In fact, maybe they did. The AAFC closed its doors at the end of the ’49 season, and the Browns took their show over to the big-league NFL in 1950—where they dominated that league for the next six years too!

Dynasties. The ’40s Browns, the ’90s Bulls. Now, JJ and the 48—the New York Yankees of NASCAR.

Alan Ross is the author of 32 books and a regular contributor to American Profile. E-mail: alanross_sports@yahoo.com
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