Why 3 Joe Gibbs Racing drivers had tire trouble at Bristol Motor Speedway
On Sunday at Bristol Motor Speedway, Joe Gibbs Racing saw both ends of the spectrum. Carl Edwards dominated the race and ended up in Victory Lane for the first time this year, also locking up a spot in the Chase. Now, on the other side of the spectrum their three other cars combined had seven right-front tire failures.
When all seven failures come from one organization, other than Brad Keselowski when he had a valve stem knocked off, well common sense says the common denominator is something with the Gibbs cars. There had to be something wrong with the setup of those cars.
Can you imagine what had to be going through Carl's mind as the laps wound down? Here he is dominating the race, on his way to his first victory of the season, yet knowing his three teammates had seven tire failures.
I actually spoke to Goodyear about this issue. They are being very open-minded about it and not jumping to assumptions or conclusions. Goodyear has sent all seven of those right-front tires back to Akron, Ohio for review. They are going to look high and low at each one of them. Goodyear also wants to make sure it wasn't seven tires out of a bad batch.
Now the odds of all seven tires coming from the same batch of bad tires would be like 100 people wearing the same sure to work in their office building on a particular day. It's just not realistic, but again, I applaud Goodyear for being open-minded about looking at every possible scenario.
So Goodyear is going to analyze those tires. They are going to have in-depth conversations with the three crew chiefs to see if they can come up with a reason why it happened Sunday.
Now to muddy the waters even further, the failures on Kyle Busch's car were different than the failures of Denny Hamlin and Matt Kenseth. See the No. 18 was more bead related, while the problems with the No. 11 and No. 20 cars was more related to the inside part of the tread. So even with seven failures among three teams, the No. 18 is even more on an island by itself since their two failures were different than the others.
This is a storyline we'll be following. Then the wild card question really becomes then why didn't their fourth teammate have any issues and ended up in Victory Lane?
