When the Cup drivers raced at Iowa last year, it looked more like a “fuel-mileage” race than a typical Cup Series battle. It was William Byron’s fuel-saving gamble that allowed him to stretch his gas tank for 145 laps at the end, 50 of them under caution, to win the Iowa Corn 350. Seeing this, Goodyear decided to update the tires to create more tire falloff. While Chase Elliott didn’t get to test them back in May, his outing in Iowa has him doubting the whole change.
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“I would have to imagine it’ll be similar,” the Hendrick Motorsports driver said during his media availability at the Iowa Speedway. “You know, it sounded like the tire that everybody wanted wasn’t what they brought back.”
Elliott mentioned that he feels it was a production issue for Goodyear. Despite that, he doesn’t feel the change makes the racing “a ton different.” In fact, he’s more worried about the transition from the low-grip old asphalt to the high-grip fresh asphalt.
“It’s knowing that you’re going to have grip in 100 feet and knowing that I need to be going faster for that grip and getting through the old, you know, less-grippy part of the road and a little bit of a compromised position to get to that fresh spot. That’s the challenge, because they’re not married together. They’re so different,” Elliott continued in the same interview.
Before its Cup debut in 2024, Iowa Speedway was partially repaved, with all four corners getting new asphalt. The following year, in 2025, the new pavement still caused problems as drivers had to adjust to different grip levels, even after the track had aged for a year.
That is why the $1.85 billion tire giant decided to introduce a new left-side tire with updated construction and compound design. The goal was to create the tire management that was missing last time and produce more wear and falloff.
To help achieve that on the short track, the tires use standard NASCAR stagger, with the right-side tires having a larger rolling circumference than the left-side tires to help the cars turn naturally.
But as Elliott said, it seems Goodyear isn’t delivering its promise after he said the tires finalized are not the ones desired. Back in May, Tyler Reddick, Austin Dillon and Noah Gragson tested the new tires in a two-day session. While he didn’t comment on the tires not being their choice, Gragson’s crew chief Grant Hutchens did share his two cents on the potential falloff.
“I would guess we’re going to have about double the fall-off we had last year,” Hutchens said in an interview with NASCAR.com. “We saw in 45 laps, three-quarters of a second to a second, depending on which cars you were looking at.”
Nonetheless, Elliott’s doubt could be a warning sign for Goodyear. The tire giant had hoped to bring more action into the Iowa race in terms of falloff, but whether the final product can actually deliver it is unclear. For now, Elliott still believes the racing could be similar to last year.