Stewart, others rip Goodyear

HAMPTON, Ga. — Tony Stewart may have finished second in Sunday’s Kobalt Tools 500 at the Atlanta Motor Speedway, but he was in no mood to celebrate afterward. Stewart’s bad mood was the result of what he called an inferior Goodyear tire.

“That was the most pathetic excuse for a racing tire I’ve ever been on in my professional career,” Stewart fumed. “They exited out of Formula One, they exited out of the IRL, they exited out of the World of Outlaws, and there’s a reason for that and it’s that Goodyear can’t build a tire worth a (darn). If I were Goodyear, I would be really embarrassed about this weekend and what they brought us. How we got to second, I don’t know.

“If they can’t do any better than that, they ought to exit the sport and save us a lot of headaches. I guarantee you Hoosier, Firestone or somebody else could come in a do a much better job right now.”

Fearing there could be a rash of tire problems on the aging Atlanta surface, Goodyear officials scrapped the tire they were going to bring, opting for a much harder tire that would be safer for the competitors. The result was a tire most teams could not get a handle on, making an already-slick track even more slippery.

“These teams spend so much money to come here and the competition is so close,” Stewart said, “that to tell us a week before we come to Atlanta that all of a sudden we’re going to have a new tire and give us the data a week before and expect everybody to figure it out, is disappointing. I can’t say it’s surprising. This weekend shows their true colors and what they’re all about.”

Stewart was far from alone in his disappointment with the tire.

“I know the tires we used to run here would run into the chords, but you could still go fast,” third-place finisher Dale Earnhardt Jr. said. “Today, I could still see the center chord on my tires after 30 laps. There’s got to be a better combination somewhere in between.

“Hopefully, there was a good lesson learned. Goodyear doesn’t like people bashing their tires, but I’m not going to put up with this. Just, please, don’t do this at Darlington.”

Added fifth-place finisher Jeff Gordon, “I felt like I was going to crash every single lap. I’m exhausted right now. I feel like I’ve run a thousand miles. There’s just no reason for this. Right now, I just think Goodyear overreacted.”

Goodyear Motorsports Marketing Manager Justin Fantozzi, while refusing to get into a battle of words, defended his company’s choice of tire.

“As far as Tony’s comments, I won’t get into a one-on-one attack,” he said. “As I’ve said often, we do the best job we can with the data set we have and bring the safest tire we know how to build. It’s then up to the teams to basically have a destructive test at the race track in order to go as fast as they can.”

Stewart believes a lack of competition is part of the reason there has been so much griping about tires.

“They have no competition, so they have no reason to get better,” said Stewart, who also questioned the quality of engineers working on the tires. “I don’t know that they don’t have enough people. I just think they don’t have enough quality people. We’re pleading with Goodyear to do something about this to make it better for us so that we can race side by side. Today, as a driver, you couldn’t make a difference.”

Stewart, who has often joked with the media about retiring at the end of his current contract with Joe Gibbs Racing, ended his tirade with a warning.

“If that’s what we’ve got to look forward to every week this year, there’s going to be a lot of people looking for early retirement,” he said.

Joe Gibbs Racing President J.D. Gibbs attempted to smooth things over a bit during Kyle Busch’s winning postrace press conference.

“We trust Goodyear to make good decisions and they usually do,” he said. “Even though it was frustrating for Tony, to come out first and second is pretty good. We want a good relationship with their group and we respect what they do.”