Auto Racing

TALLADEGA — Tires in racing are like referees in football; the less you remember about them after an event, the better they performed.

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Slideshow: AMP Energy 500 View photos from the AMP Energy 500 at Talladega Superspeedway.

Unfortunately for officials at Goodyear, many eyes were fixed squarely upon the Sprint Cup Series' lone tire supplier after several scary crashes were ignited by tire problems in the Amp Energy 500 at Talladega Superspeedway.

Blown or cut tires contributed to at last four accidents during Sunday's race.

The first sign of potential tire issues was seen Friday afternoon when Dale Earnhardt Jr. blew a right rear tire in Happy Hour practice, touching off a multi-car accident.

On Sunday, it took 68 laps for tires to become the buzzword of the day. Brian Vickers was cruising in third place on Lap 68 when his right front tire exploded, touching off an eight-car melee. The force of the exploding tire ripped part of the hood and right front quarterpanel from Vickers' Red Bull Toyota.

"I felt a bomb go off in my right front tire," Vickers said. "The right tire just exploded. The same thing happened to Junior's car in practice."

Vickers was emphatic that the tire let go without any warning and seemingly with no outside cause. "I just went down into the tri-oval and it didn't cut or go flat – it exploded," Vickers said. "I saw the right-front fender going through the air before the front of the car even dropped."

The sound from Vickers' tire was so loud that Martin Truex Jr., who was running in second to Vickers' outside at the time of the crash, heard the pop over the sound of 43 engines.

"The No. 83 was right there inside of me and his right front tire exploded," Truex said. "I heard 'Bam!' like a shotgun going off."

On Lap 55, a blown tire sent David Reutimann's Toyota spinning toward the outside wall and into Jeff Gordon's Chevrolet. Reutimann said he was unsure if he might have cut the tire down, or if the tire just failed.

"It's crazy, because you've got guys blowing right-front tires and right-rear tires and stuff," Reutimann said. "I don't know; it could be a debris deal, but it's hard to say. The only thing I know for sure is that when they blow out, they do it all of a sudden and without warning."

Two other cars experience similar tire failure later in the day. On Lap 82, Mike Wallace — who was also running near the front — lost his right rear tire in a sudden, violent explosion that severely damaged what had been a fast car. Pieces from the shredded tire were slung into the air and caused multiple dents to the bumper, hood and roof of Michael Waltrip's Toyota.

Finally, on Lap 99, leader Denny Hamlin fell victim to a flat right front that shot the FedEx Toyota hard to the right and almost straight into the outside wall. The force of the crash sent Hamlin to a local hospital for further evaluation.

All of the tire issues forced Goodyear back onto the hotseat and had the tire manufacturer searching for answers before the race was even over.

"There are a lot of questions we have to ask and a lot of things we have to consider when you have a performance issue with a tire," Rick Heinrich, product manager with Goodyear, said. "The individual setups the teams have decided on using, the track conditions; that's really what we are doing right now, we are gathering all those things.

"We are looking at what material is coming off the race track, tire parts, tires that have come off cars to try to put everything together and find some correlation and find some explanation."

Heinrich said the variation between which tire was involved and the different types of failure suggested that the cause of the trouble might have been caused by other factors.

"It does suggest that something is influencing the tires," Heinrich said. "We've seen too many tires that looked too good, and we have really good conditions for tires. The ambient temperature is reasonable, and the tires haven't shown any signs of heat or stress, that's the perplexing thing is the lack of commonality."

The series of tire woes could be explained by outside factors beyond Goodyear's control. Several drivers, including second-place finisher Paul Menard and eighth-place finisher Robby Gordon, reported perfect tire wear and no concerns about tires after the race.

"I think some of those problems could be explained by fender rubs and aggressive camber," Menard said.

Similar problems were seen in Friday's ARCA race here, but Hoosier provides the tires in that series.

"I was nervous all day about having a tire blow for no reason after I had one blow for no reason Friday," Earnhardt Jr. said. "Hoosier is no better since we had the same kind of the thing in the ARCA race."

Heinrich said that data collected from the crashes here would be taken to Goodyear's main facility in Akron, Ohio, for further testing and that the analysis would assume "top priority."