Stewart blasts junk Goodyear tires

UPDATE “It [stinks]," Stewart said. “You think a company like Goodyear can do a lot better job than what they’re doing. Especially for a company that’s been in this business for so long.

“They don’t care about the competition. They don’t care about the drivers. They don’t care about the teams. All they care about is not having bad publicity and not blowing tires and getting bad publicity because of that."

Stewart said he’d give half of his $5 million-plus salary to have the Hoosier Tire Company make tires “instead of the crap we’re running on now."

[Editor's Note: And to think NASCAR just signed another long-term deal with Goodyear when for years we have been saying Goodyear tires are horrible. NASCAR just keeps making one mistake after another as its popularity continues to fall.]

03/09/07 Tony Stewart blasted the tire Goodyear brought to Las Vegas Motor Speedway after his qualifying attempt for the UAW-DaimlerChrysler 400 on Friday. "I thought Daytona was one of the worst tires we have ever ran on, but I will guarantee you this is definitely the worst Goodyear tire I think I have ever been on in my entire nine years of driving [in the] Nextel Cup Series," Stewart said. "It never ceases to amaze me on how they can always trump their ace how bad they can build tires for us."

Goodyear racing sales and marketing director Greg Stucker said later that he respects the two-time Cup champion's input.

"We do have a lot of respect for his abilities and what he can feel in the race car," Stucker said. "Tony is one of those guys, him and his whole crew are pretty easy on stuff.

"He is one of those guys that could always make the softer combination work and work very well. That was to his advantage. As we've gone harder with some of our recommendations to accommodate what the coil-binding setups are doing to the tires, that maybe he almost feels like it penalizes him."

The new tires probably drop times by three- to four-tenths a second, and the teams are more than a full second slower as a combination of the much hotter conditions and the new tires. Stucker said.

"We're trying to make a recommendation, a setup, that is safe and secure for all of them, no matter what they throw at it," Stucker said. "That's probably the biggest challenge we have.