Biffle’s crash due to yet another junk Goodyear failure?

UPDATE Greg Biffle will soon begin rehabbing the right shoulder he dislocated when he had a tire blow at Las Vegas last week when he was doing a Goodyear test with Kyle Busch. "They said it looks good. They did the MRI on it and they saw that it was dislocated off the back. I’ve had front dislocations from wrestling and stuff like that so I’ve had a bad shoulder so this just added to the problem. There are some corrective surgeries that a person can do and I’ve elected not to do any of those in the past, but possibly I may look at doing something at the end of this (2007) season. It’s definitely going to be fine to drive, I probably could drive now if I absolutely had to but certainly I’ll feel better in two or three more weeks. "Thursday was the first night I had my sling off. So, probably in about three or four more days I’ll start some rehabilitating stuff like pulling on rubber bands. There are four muscles that hold your shoulder in the socket and those are all stretched out so the best thing to do is get those strengthened before you start lifting weights or anything else." PRN's Garage Pass Radio Show

12/14/06 There have been a plethora of crashes in NASCAR in recent years as a result of Goodyear tire failures. Goodyear likes to blame the team who it usually accuses of running improper air pressures, very low air pressures. However, the number of crashes due to right front tire failures is alarming.

Greg Biffle is among the walking wounded these days after separating his shoulder last week at Las Vegas, crashing during a Goodyear tire test. Biffle doesn't remember anything. "I don’t know what happened. The guys heard the tire blow in the pits, in the garage. Boom!, they heard it. Then four seconds later they heard it hit the fence and I went all the way around the corner unconscious before I woke up. I woke up on the backstretch…I crashed in turn one you know so it was big. We don’t know what happened to the tire, they are obviously looking at it. Did it cut, did we run over something on the racetrack, did the tire fail? You just don’t know. Problem is with issues like that when they blow out and hit the fence and they catch on fire there’s nothing left to inspect. The right rear tire looks fine and all the left side tires look good, so we don’t know. You can’t blame the tire until you really analyze what might have happened." PRN's Garage Pass Radio Show

In most other racing series Goodyear tires are no longer used by teams who have found them to be inferior is all aspects. However, NASCAR continues to protect Goodyear and allow them to be the exclusive tire supplier. But for how long? Will it take killing one of NASCAR's superstars before Goodyear is run out of the paddock? We like Biffle's description above, "in the pits and in the garage my team members could hear it go boom!" Boom indeed.