Atlanta 500 post-race news conference
If you're new here, thanks for coming by. You may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Not sure how I missed this but here’s Tony’s part of the post-race press conference from last Sunday at Atlanta.
THE MODERATOR: Let’s hear from Tony Stewart. He was second in today’s race. He drives the No. 20 Home Depot Toyota. Tony, your thoughts about how you ran out there today.
TONY STEWART: I’m really excited that I didn’t crash. That was half the battle in itself. Been racing 28 years and been a part of a lot of different professional series and never seen a quality of racing tire like I’ve seen this weekend. It’s a little bit like I caught Dale saying. I mean, you know, there’s got to be something in between. And if Goodyear thinks that was their best effort today, I’m really disappointed because, you know, these teams spent so much money to come here and the competition is so close.
You know, to tell us a week before we come to Atlanta that all of a sudden we’re going to have a new tire and give us the data a week before and expect everybody to figure it out in a week is pretty disappointing.
But, you know, I guess I can’t say it’s surprising because, I mean, they got run out of Formula One, they got run out of CART, the IRL, they got run out of World Outlaw Sprint cars, they got run out of USAC divisions because they couldn’t keep up and make a quality enough product.
You know, this weekend shows their true colors and what they’re about. You know, they’ve done some great things over the years. But, you know, as technology has gone on and as the technology of these cars has gone on, they can’t keep up. That’s what puts us in positions like we were in this weekend as drivers and teams. It makes for a miserable day out there.
Like Dale said, it’s so hard. It’s hard enough just to get the balance of your car from stop to stop making the changes, but then when you put tires on and don’t know what they’re going to do when you put them on, it makes it that much more disappointing. You know, it makes also days like today, when you get lucky enough to finish, you know, second and have your teammate win, it makes days like that great.
But, man, I mean, if the rest of the year, if that’s what we got to look forward to, is weekends like this, there will be a lot of drivers going into retirement a lot earlier because nobody’s going to want to keep doing this like this.
Q. A situation where you have to race on a tire that’s not raceable, will NASCAR pay attention, will Goodyear pay attention? Are you stuck with what you got?
TONY STEWART: There’s drivers that get picked to do tire tests throughout the year and they pick a team from each manufacturer to go. We did the tire test for Las Vegas. About all that we can do as drivers is just do what we’re supposed to do when we get there, and that’s give them input from set to set on what the car felt like. They don’t tell us necessarily before they put the set of tires on what’s different about it. It’s our job to give them feedback of what was different from that set from their baseline set.
But just like Vegas last year, we all tested one tire. They panicked, brought a harder tire. It was a disaster for everybody. It prompted this last minute decision by them.
It’s not up to us. It’s up to Goodyear. The bad thing is they’ve got an exclusive deal. They have no reason to have to push and make their product better because they have no competition.
So I don’t know what it’s going to take to get them to give us a quality tire that this series and NASCAR deserves. But they obviously aren’t capable of doing it right now.
Q. Tony, you made reference in your radio interview that Goodyear doesn’t have enough people. Do you feel like that would help solve the problem, if they upped their investment? Two, is the new car perhaps causing some of this problem with them not being able to get a handle on the tire?
TONY STEWART: I mean, there’s a possibility the new car’s part of it. But still, I mean, it’s not like Goodyear’s just started building tires two or three years ago and they don’t have an idea of what to do. I mean, they’ve been in this sport a long time. And if you haven’t figured it out by now, you probably don’t have the right group of guys figuring it out.
I wasn’t saying that they don’t have enough people. I don’t know if they have enough quality people because the guys they’ve got obviously aren’t getting it done right now. I mean, you know, this week’s proof of it. It’s like Junior said. The reason we’re talking about it and the reason that we’re bringing it to everybody’s attention is because we don’t want to have to race on tires like we raced on today every week. This wasn’t fun today. There wasn’t anything about today’s race that was fun I don’t think for anybody.
I mean, do something about this, make it better. It wasn’t like we ran three or four green flag lap runs. We had one green flag pit stop in that whole deal. That’s just how bad the field was. If your car was a little off, it was way off. I mean, you didn’t have a choice. It wasn’t like you could make the difference as a driver. All you could do is hold on and try to find a spot that was a little better on the track. But you couldn’t go there and race guys. Like Junior said, if somebody got to you, got on the outside of you, you didn’t have a choice of whether you wanted to let them go. You had to. It was either that or you were putting yourself in jeopardy of wrecking your race car. There were a lot of times you were by yourself you were putting yourself in jeopardy of wrecking your racecar.
It’s not that we’re just trying to beat ‘em up. We want I don’t know how else you plead with them or get their attention enough to bring something that’s better than what it is. I mean, this isn’t the first time that they’ve been to Atlanta Motor Speedway.
Q. Tony, you may want to answer this. NASCAR always seems to feel it’s safety first. Is this to you, A No. 1, a safety issue more than anything else?
TONY STEWART: Well, I mean, nobody got hurt today luckily that I know of. You know, it’s like Junior said. I mean, it’s a PR game. That’s the reason that Goodyear spends the money they spend in NASCAR to be the exclusive tire provider. It’s good advertising for ‘em.
But with that comes a responsibility. And, you know, it is, A, a responsibility of providing safe tires for us. But at the same time you got to provide a product that is competitive and is current and leads us to be able to do the things in the racecar that NASCAR expects us to be able to do as drivers during the course of a race.
You know, what it’s gonna take to do that I don’t know. I mean, we don’t have the answers. I’m not any smarter than their engineers are. But, like we said, there’s guys that have been in this business that have been here for a lot of years with that company and doesn’t seem like that at this point they’ve got a very good handle on all those years of, you know, trial and error.
Q. The way that the tires are provided has changed in the last two seasons where there’s the lease system, you don’t buy the tires, you turn them back in. Do you think the change in the system creates less incentive to make production schedules? Do you think this whole system has anything to do with the tire situation getting worse?
TONY STEWART: I honestly don’t know. But, you know, honestly that’s not our responsibility as competitors. I mean, that’s not at all anybody in NASCAR’s responsibility. That’s not the teams’ responsibilities. That’s not the drivers’ responsibility. Goodyear signed a contract with NASCAR to provide these tires for the next five years. With that comes their responsibility. It doesn’t matter how they do it. We don’t care (loss of audio). I’ll be honest, I don’t want to take them home. I don’t have anything I’d bolt them on (loss of audio).
Q. (No audio.)
TONY STEWART: That’s the nature of the beast. It strictly was handling. If you could get your car to carry more momentum through the corner, you could be probably 10 horsepower down and run the same lap time as somebody that had 10 more horsepower if you just got your car driving good.
I was happy with what we had today. Obviously when we get back, we want more. But we’re on stage, we’re three or four races into the schedule. We’re still trying to get the reliability. Knock on wood, we haven’t had any motor failures, and that’s because they’re smart enough to know when to push that envelope and when to not. To have us run 1 2 today and to know we’ve still got more back at the shop, I would say we’re in pretty shape in that category.
Q. Kyle Busch led over 300 laps this weekend in the various divisions. A lot of them were sideways. Is he able to go faster just ’cause he’s throwing caution to the wind and driving sideways?
TONY STEWART: He is. He’s amazing to me. You know, I’m proud to have him as a teammate. I think he’s been a huge asset to Joe Gibbs Racing, obviously. It’s fun to watch him. I mean, the nights that he runs the truck race and we’re sitting in the bus, I mean, I normally don’t pay as close attention (loss of audio). He’s got everything that car is capable of. That’s what you want out of a guy. You know, any time you try to fix one of those problems, you can make the problems worse. When it comes to making all the adjustments you want to make, you want to start (loss of audio).
TONY STEWART: That and you couldn’t get close enough to each other. You never stayed around any one person for very long because you just couldn’t. I mean, they became so aero dependent because you have mechanical grip, which is your tires, your shocks and your springs, then you’ve got your aero balance. If you take away that mechanical grip, making a hard tire took away mechanical grip, you’re relying even that much more on the aero percentage. And that leads to not being closer to guys.
And when guys’ cars are driving as bad when we lapped guys, we got a chance to see a lot of guys. We know how bad our cars drove and we finished in the top five. Can you imagine the guys running in 20th, 25th place, how bad their cars drove. Well, we got to see it. The reason they weren’t crashing is they weren’t willing to run it any harder than that.
When you’re not around guys, you probably around you know, you’re not going to push the issue as much as when you’re racing somebody for position and you try that extra little bit and step over that line. You know, we just didn’t have those situations today and I think that’s why you didn’t see any more cautions than you did and you didn’t see any more wrecks than you did. It’s because guys got separated. You were racing yourself. You really weren’t racing anybody else. You were racing your car and how it was driving on the racetrack.
Q. Obviously a lot of advances have been made in driver safety. Is this tire going to end up costing somebody down the road? Is that why you’re so outspoken, is due to the driver safety issue?
TONY STEWART: I don’t think it’s so much that as just, you know, nobody liked the way their cars drove. I mean, a series at this level, I mean, we expect our racecars to drive better than that and we expect a tire that’s up to that level of competition that the teams build the cars. And that’s not what we had. We had a tire that didn’t meet the standards of the competition here obviously. You know, obviously if we crashed a bunch of cars today, then obviously that would have been a bigger concern.
But with no more crashes than we had, I don’t think it’s an issue of safety as much as it is just an issue of performance and comfort in the car and feeling comfortable driving your racecar. When you feel like you’re holding your breath all day, I mean, when everybody in the field was tired when they got out of their cars today, that normally doesn’t happen here like that. I mean, when you’re that tired, it’s ’cause you had to work even that much harder.
It’s not that we’re scared to work. There’s none of us scared to work behind the wheel of a racecar. It’s being put in that position that we don’t like.
Q. When you guys say you don’t want to work that hard, it will come across that way. Can you define how hard it is in the racecar as how hard it would be before and where the line is? I know people will tear that apart. I’m truthfully asking for you to define it, if you would.
TONY STEWART: That makes sense. Let’s see if we can put it in a way that makes more sense.
Like Dale said, you know, we’re accustomed to running two seconds faster here. We’re still as drivers (loss of audio). It’s just not as comfortable as doing it. When you go in a corner and you don’t know if the thing is going to jump out from underneath you or if it’s actually going to go straight when you get to the corner, that’s a pretty big concern. That makes you hold your breath getting in. That makes you tense up. That’s why we’re more tired today than we would be on a day when we have a tire that does have grip.
We’re still going to drive these cars to get better performance and speed out of them as we can. So are the teams. We made changes in the garage area during practice and it didn’t make the car do anything any different. I mean, it didn’t respond to it. When you make changes like that and the (loss of audio).
So don’t confuse me saying that. You know, we’ll still work just as hard. But we’ll go two seconds faster doing it. But it’s more comfortable doing it when you got a different tire.
Leave a Reply