NASCAR insiders respond to Joey Logano, Ty Dillon tire strategy at Phoenix

The use of NASCAR’s soft compound red option tires made for some interesting tire strategy during the race at Phoenix over the weekend. There were several different approaches.

Joey Logano and Ty Dillon were two of the drivers that used very different strategies from the rest of the field. And it paid dividends for both drivers, to a certain extent, even though they took opposite approaches.

On The Teardown podcast, NASCAR insider for The Athletic Jeff Gluck broke down Logano’s approach. His tire strategy was to use his two sets of red option tires early in the race.

“They fall all the way to the back and they decide, you know what, we’re going to put on this set of reds. And it works,” Gluck said. “He drives all the way back to the lead. So then they get to Stage 3 and it’s like, OK, what’s he going to do now because he only has one set of red option tires left, everybody else has two.

“Oh my gosh, what’s he going to do? He’s probably going to have to save these. No, they put them on again. Start Stage 3. It’s like, whoa, how’s this going to play out?”

Gluck said he figured the team had a pretty solid tire strategy in that case to make such a call. He assumed that meant, as readers on Twitter pointed out, that Logano was hoping for a caution between laps 80-90, so other drivers would be forced to take their reds off again and Logano would have benefited from them getting a shorter run.

That wasn’t really the case, though.

“Well guess what? (Crew chief) Paul Wolfe says that wasn’t the plan,” Gluck revealed. “I think we were giving them a little bit too much credit. He said, ‘Well, we’re just trying to minimize the damage, we already used our set.’ Paul Wolfe said, ‘I thought if this ran green and we could get a big enough lead with our red tires and then we pitted with like 60 to go then maybe we could still finish eighth or ninth. He was going for a top 10, he wasn’t going for the win. That wasn’t the play.

“But again, it’s like you’re watching it during the race and you don’t know that.”

Nor did you know what the tire strategy for Dillon was most of the race. Dillon opted not to use his red option tires early, saving them for late in the race.

Gluck’s co-host on the podcast, Jordan Bianchi, spoke to Dillon’s tire strategy. Like Logano’s, it came as a surprise.

“A moment for me as we Monday morning quarterback this is Ty Dillon somehow saved two sets of red for the end,” Bianchi said. “And the way it fell, it actually fell in his favor. This dude’s like, whoa, we could legit have an upset winner here. Then he sped on pit road.

“I will say this: He was still on reds. He should have come back down pit road on the caution and taken off of the reds and gone to a yellow, because everyone else in front of him was pretty much on the reds too. So you’re not going to get any advantage. So switch it up, go the other way and hope you get a caution. And if you get a caution, come back down pit road and then you put your reds on and then you can blow by everybody. And it actually fell, the cautions fell, if he would have done that he had a chance here to steal a top 10 for sure. Top 5, who knows? But that was the thing where you’re looking at this going, ‘You need to take those things off.’

“It adds a whole different element that you don’t even think about as this unfolds.”