Barber: Sonoma Raceway's winding track tests tires to the max

SONOMA

With blue California skies overhead and undulating golden hills as backdrop, Sonoma Raceway is easy on the eyes. But man, it’s hard on tires.

Race aficionados like to talk about how Sonoma’s twisting road course favors old-fashioned panache. It’s not about how fast your car can go here, because there isn’t enough straightaway to get it to full speed. It’s about the craftiness and aggressiveness of the guy behind the wheel, and his/her ability to maneuver in close quarters.

All of that is true, but to emphasize it is to glamorize the Toyota/Save Mart 350, which revs up Sunday. More than any other race on the NASCAR Monster Energy Cup series, this one is based on pit strategy. More specifically, it’s based on tire strategy. And tire performance.

“What usually happens is you get one guy who’s happy, and he’s the guy who won the race, and there’s 39 guys who want a better tire,” Stu Grant told me.

Grant is Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company’s general manager of worldwide racing. He is tall, lean and balding, with a bushy gray mustache. He more or less looks like you would expect a senior Goodyear engineer to look. It was a hot day in Carneros when we spoke, but the air-conditioned Goodyear hauler was cool and comfortable.

That rig sits inconspicuously behind the gauntlet of colorful team haulers lined up opposite the raceway garages, but every NASCAR team knows its location. Goodyear has four engineers here for race weekend, not counting Grant. From Friday, when the teams practice, through Sunday, when they race tooth and nail for victory, those engineers are in heavy demand for consultation and ear-bending.

Goodyear supplies every tire used in each tier of NASCAR racing, about 100,000 total in a year. The two companies have been partners for 64 years, and Goodyear has been the exclusive supplier since 1997. In the Cup series, each massive, glassy-smooth tire costs exactly $497.

Behind the scenes, everyone is paying a lot of attention to tread. As each car leaves the garage and rumbles toward the track, it passes between two beige plastic boxes that look like Army-issue ice chests with antennae. The boxes contain sensors that read the chip that has been embedded in each tire, to make sure each team is using its fair allotment.

Whenever tires come off a car, crew members use something called a pyrometer to read the temperature of each one at three different spots across the tread. (Tires reach a max of about 300 degrees during NASCAR races.) They also scrape away excess rubber picked up from the track and measure tread depth using “wear pins” etched into the rubber. Teams share all of that information with Goodyear.

Not all NASCAR tires are created equally, of course. The units that Goodyear brings to Sonoma feature the softest tread compound used on the Cup circuit. Why? Because Sonoma’s sharp turns require heavy breaking and heavy acceleration. These tires aren’t built for gliding. They need some bite. Even more than is required on the series’ other road course, at Watkins Glen, New York, which isn’t considered as technically challenging.

Another Sonoma quirk: Because of the left and right turns, Goodyear provides the same tire (the D-4678, if you’re into that sort of thing) for all four positions on the car. That’s unheard of on the ovals.

“If we tried to take this setup and run it at Daytona, for example, the right-side tires would probably overheat in just a matter of a few laps,” Grant said. “Just because the compound doesn’t have the heat resistance needed to carry the speed and the load of these cars at a high-banked racetrack.”

Each team gets three sets of tires for practice, one set for today’s qualifying and six sets for the race. It’s highly unlikely that a car would run through all six sets on Sunday, though. Most teams pit just three times during the 350. And the limiting factor is the tires.

“I don’t know that you can win this race by doing it on two stops,” Fox Sports analyst and former NASCAR crew chief Larry McReynolds told USA Today in 2016. “You can easily do two stops on fuel, but I think you’re going to have to make three stops.”

Juan Pablo Montoya famously took the flag at Sonoma on two pit stops in 2007. But that was before Goodyear went to the softer compound, and before NASCAR started awarding drivers points for winning race stages.

Most drivers wouldn’t rely on two stops here, anyway, because this course chews up tires and spits them out like sunflower-seed shells. Part of it is the heat, which, as you can imagine, tends to melt rubber. Part of it is the rough road at Sonoma, which hasn’t been repaved since a major remodel in 2002.

“The worn-out pavement causes tires to wear out fast,” driver Martin Truex Jr., the reigning Cup champion, said earlier this week.

But Grant doesn’t blame the track for the shredded rubber. He knows it’s all that braking and accelerating eating at his tires. “By the same token, you’ve got some really fast transitions right to left - in the ?esses (S-curves), for example,” he added. “Instead of being super slow, those corners are super fast. So if you’re a crew chief, it’s a balance.”

No one wants to abandon his position and leave the track for pit row. But NASCAR drivers face a dilemma, especially here. The longer the tires are on the course, the less grip they offer. The effect is tangible.

“This track has as much fall-off as any we see,” recently retired driver Jeff Gordon said on Fox’s NASCAR telecast Saturday. “About three seconds by the end of a run.”

In other words, a car with new tires can turn a lap three seconds faster than the same car with old tires. The drivers feel it.

“It’s really hard to accelerate out of the corner, is the biggest thing I notice when the tires start to wear out,” Denny Hamlin said Friday. “You just can’t put the throttle down nearly as hard as you can early in a run.

That sounds frustrating, but Hamlin likes the challenge.

“As drivers, anytime we have a race track that has close to a four-second fall-off, that is gonna make for really fun racing,” he said. “And it makes it fun without needed restarts. There’s gonna be so many different strategies. And I remember last year, the 2 car (driven by Brad Keselowski) came and put tires on, made an extra pit stop and kind of motored through the field. As a race fan, that’s fun to watch.”

You can see why pit strategy becomes so important at Sonoma.

It’s fun to think of auto racing as a test of reflexes and nerve. The truth is, it’s just as much a calculation of temperature, inflation and tread components.