RICHMOND, Va. – Daniel Suarez admittedly was biased, but the Trackhouse driver believes the option tire experiment needs to be expanded everywhere after its Cup points race debut Sunday at Richmond Raceway.
“It was fun, man,” Suarez said after his No. 99 Chevrolet team won Stage 2 and finished 10th with perhaps the most successful strategy in the 400-lap race. “ I give a huge credit to NASCAR and to Goodyear for bringing this option tire because it’s a lot of fun. I don’t see why we don’t have an option tire everywhere we go.”
Including the 2024 playoffs?
“Why not? I mean, if you can find somebody here in the racetrack that didn’t like the race, bring them over,” Suarez said. “Because I don’t think you can find one person. It’s just more fun, you know? You bring more strategy into the table, more passing. It’s fun. As a race car driver, for the team, for the fans, for the (media), it’s a good thing.”
It definitely was good for Suarez, who was among the first to switch to the softer compound tire (which is faster at the outset of a run but wears more quickly at the end) after Stage 1. Suarez qualified 21st and ran outside the top 15 for much of the opening 72 laps before his first pit stop.
He restarted the second stage in 16th but needed only 12 laps to take the lead by passing the 15 cars ahead on primary tires (also known as “yellows” vs. the option “reds” because of the color of their lettering).
“It was like Mario Kart with a star,” Suarez said. “I guarantee you I had more fun than everyone else.”
Though he switched back to primaries for stops on Lap 122 and Lap 171, Suarez stayed near the front and cycled back into the lead on Lap 186 and was in first when Stage 2 ended on Lap 230.
Suarez, who is locked into the playoffs through his Atlanta victory, earned a playoff point through the strategy, which he and crew chief Matt Swiderski devised as a way to get off sequence with the prerace conventional wisdom being that the contending cars would need to save their two option sets for the final stage.
“If we were putting on the option in the Stage 3, which most people were wanting to do that, everyone was going to have the option and the advantage it wasn’t going to be really an advantage,” he said. “So we decided to put it on early. It worked out. We got a stage win out of that. We showed it was good. I mean, if the last caution wasn’t coming out, we’re going to look like heroes right now, right?”
Suarez pitted from fifth on Lap 360 of a scheduled 400 for his final set of option tires, and he again zoomed from midpack to the edge of the top five while turning laps that were a second faster than the top five all of which were on the primary tire.
This was the second time that NASCAR used two tire compounds in a race after trying it in the All-Star Race at North Wilkesboro Speedway. The option tire was designed to run faster for the first 25 laps and then wear out at a much greater rate than the primary, particularly after 35 laps.
Goodyear director of racing Greg Stucker hailed the project as a success at Richmond.
“The option tire worked exactly as it was intended,” Stucker said in a release. “They fired off immediately and were more than a half-second faster than the prime, which is big on a short track. Also, the options gave up significantly more than the primes over a long run, as intended. At about the 25-lap mark, the lap times evened off, so the options proved fast early while the primes were strong on the long run.
“What was really exciting was how different teams used the option tire at different times to accomplish their own goals. Daniel Suarez put them on early in the race and charged from the middle of the pack to take the lead, while Kyle Busch put them on at the end of Stage 2 to try to get a lap back. Overall, the primes/options tire set-ups highlighted the risk versus reward we were exactly looking for.”
There were some risks that went the wrong way. Brad Keselowski waited 72 laps into Stage 2 to pit from sixth for the option tire in hopes of a stage win. He ended the stage a lap down and finished 16th.
Until a wreck involving Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and Ryan Preece brought out the race’s first “natural” yellow flag on Lap 399 of a scheduled 400, Suarez was poised to become the highest-finishing car to have used both sets of option tires. But during the caution, all the lead-lap cars with an option set left used them.
Race winner Austin Dillon’s team had debated whether to start the final 170-lap stage on the red option tires, switch to yellow primaries and then finish on reds. But Dillon stayed on the primary tire for his final green-flag stop on Lap 334, saving his last option set for the overtime restart.
“It definitely was a bigger challenge than most weeks,” said Justin Alexander, Dillon’s crew chief. “The biggest thing I think was when to put them on obviously and how to get the most out of the. I didn’t think a lot of guys were going to put them on early. I didn’t think you wanted to. It would have got you track position, but it was going to bite you back in the end.
“We debated whether we saved a set for the end of the race back and forth. We almost put a set on. It made our job a lot more difficult. I think it was cool from a fan perspective to see the different strategies. There was definitely a big difference in pace, especially Richmond with so many other strategies you have going on. I think it was a success in my opinion. Whether we do more or not, I don’t know. It makes it tough.”