NASCAR insider: Phoenix race ‘would have been a snoozefest’ without Goodyear option tire

A NASCAR insider got brutally honest when he shared his thoughts on Sunday’s Cup Series race at Phoenix. On The Teardown podcast, Jordan Binanchi of The Athletic said the option tires saved the race because it made things more exciting.

“I think Phoenix and NASCAR owe a big thank you to Goodyear because without the option tires, this race would have been a snoozefest,” Bianchi said. “This has just not been a great track, but the tire compound added an element to this race. It added entertainment, it added passing; it added strategy, it added all the things that largely are missing from Phoenix races, we say that today.

NASCAR insider says tire compound ‘saved’ Phoenix race

“For the people that say, well, this was a gimmick and we want to see pure racing, the best car won. If this race is a straight-up race, no option tires, I bet you dollars to donuts [Christopher] Bell wins this race going away. But it was entertaining in between because we had a lot of different things happen. Without the option tire, we’re not talking about a race that had a lot of different elements that had potential upset wins. …This would have been a (Joe Gibbs Racing) Toyota runaway. We would have been like, oh my God, we got to come back here for the championship. What are we going to do? We got to do something else. The tire compound saved this race and made it far more interesting than it otherwise would have been.”

In January, NASCAR announced that the Goodyear option tire would return to the NASCAR Cup Series for the Phoenix race. NASCAR said the goal of the option tire was to increase grip.

“Phoenix has been an important track, with it being the site of championship weekend for the past several years,” Stu Grant, Goodyear’s general manager of global race tires, said in a press release before the Phoenix race. “This weekend, we continue with the development of the short-track package for the Cup Series, and we will have an option tire as part of the racing. We quite successfully ran an option twice last season, so we now get a look at it on a racy, 1-mile track. Cup teams will have two sets of options for the race, so we’ll see, like at the second Richmond race last season, how teams will deploy them to best maximize their strategy.”

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