- Race day dawned with weather forecasters predicting severe thunderstorms, strong winds, hail and possibly a tornado.
- A persistent morning drizzle finally stopped about midday and the race started on time with the 36-car field on slick tires.
- NASCAR official Elton Sawyer admitted after the event that if wet tires hadn’t been available, the race would have been called.
Motorsports history will define Sunday’s USA Today 301 NASCAR Cup race as the tale of two events—one on wet tires and the other on slicks.
It was an historic moment that winner Christopher Bell will never forget.
“For NASCAR to run in the rain like that or not in the rain, but run in the damp conditions on an oval … I had a blast. It made it different,” said Bell, who finished 1.104 seconds ahead of likely future Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Chase Briscoe.
“Hopefully, that was entertaining because it was something different, something new, and nobody knew what to expect and what to do. The guys that figured it out the quickest were the most successful.”
Initially, the lap times were about 4 seconds slower with the wet tires, but as the drivers became more comfortable the lap times picked up by about 2 seconds. By the time the race ended in overtime, the drivers had run 86 laps on wet tires.
“There’s still some things that we’re learning through this process, and, in all honesty, we’d like to be out of the tire business,” NASCAR Senior Vice President of Competition Elton Sawyer said. “We’d like to just turn that over to the teams, but as we continue to take small steps, and we learn, eventually, we’ll get there. We just want to do this in the safest way possible.”
Sunday’s race marked the first time since NASCAR began using wet tires that it had switched to them during an event that started on slicks. All three NASCAR national touring series have started an event on wet tires.
“If you think about it, we’ve only got maybe four data points,” Sawyer said. “We ran the trucks at Martinsville, the All-Star race, with the Cup cars at Richmond, and now here, which is one of the faster short ovals that we run on. We’ll get back to the R&D Center … and look at all the things that transpired today.”
Race day dawned with weather forecasters predicting severe thunderstorms, strong winds, hail and possibly a tornado. A persistent morning drizzle finally stopped about midday and the race started on time with the 36-car field on slick tires. When the green flag waved, the one-mile track’s location was already under severe thunderstorm and tornado watches.
For more than 200 laps, bad weather stayed south of the track, but then with 82 laps remaining in the scheduled 301-lap race a severe thunderstorm struck the track, halting the race for 2 hours 14 minutes and 49 seconds.
Sawyer admitted after the event that if wet tires hadn’t been available, the race would have been called. Now, however, the race took on an entirely different complexion. While still under red-flag conditions NASCAR ordered the crews to switch the tires on their cars from slicks to wet. Any pit stops during this portion of the race would be non-competitive due to the wet pit road.
However, it was a different story on the track as the drivers used every lane, including the apron, to find which worked the best with the wet tires. Two more pit stops were needed to change tires as the track began drying, causing the wet tires to wear quicker. The competitors took on their second set of wet tires during the race’s 11th caution period, which consumed laps 266-274. When the 12th yellow flag waved on lap 285, the drivers were allowed to receive their third set of wet tires.
“I was probably the biggest skeptic when they said they wanted to run wet at the ovals,” said winning crew chief Adam Stevens. “I thought they were crazy, and they proved me wrong.
“They did a really good job of coming up with a plan methodically of how wet was too wet. We tried all those gizmos with the wipers and the blinking lights and the mud flaps that didn’t do anything.”They figured out once they got the water off the race track that you could run in it. That was probably the best way to dry the track, too. Those are all boxes I never thought we would have checked from the way that whole project started out, but kudos to them for being visionaries in that regard.”