Denny Hamlin, Dale Earnhardt Jr. dig in on Goodyear issue limiting great NASCAR racing

Denny Hamlin was the class of the field at Martinsville Speedway this past weekend. He utilized his Goodyear tires better than anyone else at the short-track, but he believes the company can help take the excitement further with a couple of changes moving forward.

The 55-time NASCAR Cup Series winner joined Dale Earnhardt Jr. to discuss the topic of Goodyear’s impact on the current state of racing earlier this week. Evidently, Hamlin believes it’s more of a process issue than a tire issue that Goodyear is dealing with when it comes to softness, and the company needs to take it one step further in the future.

“I don’t know how much softer they can go. It’s about how much can they do,” Hamlin told Earnhardt Jr. following his win, via The Dale Jr. Download. “I think they’ve got a process issue now, where they’re going to have to do some retooling, or something with their — I think they’re at the limit of how soft they can build a tire right now, with the equipment that they have. They’re going to have to invest more money in the equipment to get a softer tire. But it needs to be softer.

“Right now, what I’ve noticed is — by the time the lap times really start dropping, and you see a disparity in the speed between the cars, that’s when the caution comes out. That’s when a stage is over. We’ve got to shorten that window up a little bit. Right now, it seems like it was about Lap 70, 80, that cars really started taking a dump. It needs to move back to about 30, 40.

“That’s what it was in practice. The minute those cars get it going around there, and they start filling up the pores of that race track with tire rubber, it just goes away. That’s such a tough job for Goodyear to have to do, to have to build a tire that they know when they go to a tire test is going to wear-out in 20 laps, but just have faith it’s going to go 80 when we go into real conditions.”

All told, Hamlin’s conjecture sounds solid in theory. Will Goodyear be able to come up with something different that satisfies NASCAR drivers and their fanbase? That remains to be seen, but it’s evident that change is needed.

Denny Hamlin and Dale Earnhardt Jr. can at least agree on that. The future is murky when it comes to Goodyear and the product they’re providing the Cup Series, but as long as they keep working at it, a solution could arise sooner rather than later.