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One of the big arguments made by several fans this week after last Sunday's now nearly officially named "Tire Fiasco de Brickyard" was that NASCAR needs to seriously look at having two or three official tire suppliers for the sport. It seems simple enough, right? Put in the all-American thought that competition leads to improvement, and Voila!, you never have a single tire problem in NASCAR because teams will be able to select the best tire for their race car on any given weekend.
Unfortunately, this is nothing more than a classic example of what you see is not what you get.
NASCAR has been down this road before.
In the early 1990's, Hoosier Tire came into the sport as competition to Goodyear. Hoosier -- naturally an Indiana-based company -- was mildly successful in their five-year foray, winning the Daytona 500 and the pole for the 1994 Brickyard 400, in addition to a handful or so of races with Geoffrey Bodine in 1994.
The competition, though, was on the verge of getting more and more dangerous every race. The warring tire companies kept pushing the envelope of making their tires softer and softer.
Soft tires are much faster because they grip the track better, but they also wear faster and heat up quicker, leading to an increased possibility of a blown tire -- which isn't a good thing when cars are going faster and faster.
NASCAR ultimately got rid of Hoosier at the beginning of the 1995 season thanks to a policy that the sanctioning body had that required any tire supplier to have enough tires at the track to fully outfit the entire field at any given race. A requirement like that was simply not financially feasible for a smaller operation like Hoosier that was only outfitting ten or so cars per race.
As a result, Hoosier departed from the sport, unable to meet NASCAR's strict demand that some say could have been more a way for NASCAR to force Hoosier out without taking the fall for firing a tire supplier.
Today, though, the problem for major tire supplier like Firestone or even potentially an international company like Michelin coming into the sport wouldn't necessarily be matching the required tire supply, but rather the safety aspect of the tire battle.
Does NASCAR need a new tire supplier? Potentially, especially if Goodyear can't dedicate more resources to making this sport work, or if they can't be more proactive in forcing NASCAR's hand for more testing. But it certainly doesn't need competing tire suppliers.
Safety, after all, isn't something that should be compromised in the pursuit of better racing.
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