Fortunately for me I was not one of the 400,000 unhappy, sweltering fans at the Brickyard 400 today who watched yet another tire farce. Goodyear, despite its spring test at IMS and loads of data on the Car of Tomorrow, could not field a suitable tire for the Brickyard 400.
Sound familiar? It should.
In 2005 Michelen pulled the same shenanigans and brought a tire to the United States Grand Prix so worthless that it could not withstand the loading in turn 13 (turn 1 on the oval). This race differed from today's race, however, because the Michelen-shod competitors in 2005 pulled into the garage on the pace lap and chose not to compete, thus shaming themselves along with Michelen.
The end result of the USGP fiasco was that Michelen refunded the hard earned money that each fan paid to see the event. The teams that pulled out of the Grand Prix apologized to the fans (but F1 would eventually have the final say and screw all US fans two years later).
Yours truly did make a profit on the event: I paid $5 for parking, $50 for an $85 face value ticket and got the full $85 refund.
And, for what it's worth, the picture of Michael Schumacher in the blog title comes from that race.
Michelen had to provide the refund because it knew there were no excuses to bring a shoddy tire to the Speedway. Michelen had data on that turn, and it had data on the cars. It failed to deliver.
The same goes for Goodyear today. Twelve laps maximum on one set of tires? Please. The competition yellows must've been excruciating for the fans sitting there sweating their arses off in 90 degrees F heat index range.
The track has been there for almost 100 years; it's had the current surface for at least 3 years. The Car of Tomorrow was introduced last year at select races for the specific purpose of data collection and engineering development. Goodyear even had an entire winter to run tests and simulations for this event. The fact of the matter is that Goodyear screwed the pooch this year, and it owes the fans just as Michelen owed the F1 fans in 2005.
No fan deserves that treatment, and NASCAR will be lucky if it does not come under fire from the fans.
Lucky for me my wife and I spent the day in Greenwood eating cajun food (Yats is great, by the way) and browsing sporting goods stores. I've been down the tire road already.
2 comments:
At least Goodyear tried to solve the problem instead of blaming everyone (even if that solution didn't work as well as anyone would have wished). Still disappointing for everyone who would have been watching though.
ALC ... true, Goodyear did try. It was better than Michelen's advice of "don't race".
I'll never be able to understand how tire manufacturers, in the presence of an abundance of data and data analysis techniques, can get a tire selection wrong.
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