Phoenix Proves the Case for More Practice

Lack of more practice time, not playoff format or tires, caused the Phoenix race to inordinately depended on chance rather than skill.

This is the second year in a row that the end of the NASCAR season left a sour taste in my mouth. Last year, it was manufacturer manipulation at Martinsville that excluded Christopher Bell from the Championship 4. This year, it was a race in which chance played more role than skill.

It Was the Tires, Right?

To be clear: There was nothing wrong with the tires. Goodyear brought the tire teams and fans have been clamoring for.

NASCAR chose to run different tires for the Phoenix finale than they did at the earlier spring race. This surprised me, given that NASCAR has repeatedly said that they don’t want to change things in the playoffs.

Technically, you can argue that the tires aren’t “new” new. The same set were run at several short tracks this year, including New Hampshire. The same right side, with a different left side, were run the previous week at Martinsville. Goodyear argued that the knowledge gained by teams during the year was enough for them to develop good setups for Phoenix.

But New Hampshire isn’t Phoenix. Neither is Martinsville. Phoenix has its own unique properties, including an abrupt transition from track to apron and warmer weather. Practice proved that.

You Mean 50-Minutes of Practice Isn’t Enough?

NASCAR gave drivers a longer practice time given that this was the finale. But that practice session was interrupted multiple times by drivers blowing left-side tires. At least 10 drivers suffered left-side tire issues with consequences ranging from having to pit to a hard wall hit by A.J. Allmendinger.

Allmendinger’s first tire blew after four laps at speed. Chase Briscoe lost a tire in a similar time-frame. It was immediately clear that there was a discrepancy between team expectations and reality.

Some Drivers Ran 60 Laps. That’s not Enough?

No one ran 60 consecutive laps because either their tire, or someone else’s tire, blew out. For example, Ross Chastain ran:

• One 14-lap run
• Another 14-lap run on a different set of tires
• A 28-lap run on a third set of tires.

I think just one driver got a 35-lap continuous run.

Because teams spent all 50-minutes of practice dealing with left-side issues, no one ran long enough to find out that the right-side tires were also behaving differently than expected. The first clue to the right-side tire wear rate was teams seeing cording after the 60 laps of Stage 1.

Isn’t That What We Want? Drivers to Have to Manage Their Tires?

There continues to be confusion between challenging the teams with constraints and plain old randomness. The idea that everyone should show up at the track and run what they brung with no chance to improve their setup is a recipe for team and fan disappointment.

I want drivers to have to manage their tires and crew chiefs to have to manage the tire pressures, but I want it to be an intentional strategy, not a guess. With crew chiefs having no idea how long right-side tires would last, or even the failure mechanism, they had to make blind stabs in the dark rather than make a considered decision as to how far under the ‘recommended’ pressures they were willing to go.

If teams had a second practice, I suspect tire temperatures and wear from longer runs with better left-side setups would have exposed the right-side tire problems.

The Pandemic Proved We Didn’t Need Practice

The pandemic races proved that it was possible to run without practice, not that no practice makes for ideal racing.

NASCAR has stated that they want to bring back crew chef ingenuity. If they stick with sole-source parts, one of the few ways to do that is to give teams a chance to tune their setups to the particular track conditions that weekend.

So If You Ran NASCAR, What Would You Do?

Keeping in mind that NASCAR is trying to reduce costs for teams, the minimum change I would start with would be giving everyone one 50-minute practice per track. That’s IF they are running under the same conditions as the last time the series visited that track.

If anything’s changed: tires (even if a handful of cars tested there), track configuration, car changes… anything, then there would be two practices, spaced out by enough time that teams could make bigger changes to their setups.

If cost were no object, I would just go back to two practices per race. I’m fine with no practice at drafting tracks, although I’ve shown that very few cars are lost at drafting-race practices.

Conclusion

The Phoenix race was decided by failing right-side tires, giving chance a much greater role than it should have in any race, let alone a finale race. A second practice would likely have given teams enough time on track to detect the right-side tire issues and remedy them.

This is independent of playoff format, where the championship is held, etc. The exact same thing would have happened if the season champion was determined by straight points.