Happy Hour: Tires, TV ratings and Tony Stewart
Throughout the week you can send us your best questions, jokes, rants and just plain miscellaneous thoughts to [email protected] or @NickBromberg. We’ll post them here and have a good time.
We’ll start the mailbag with some news that we didn’t post earlier in the day. RCR is appealing the penalty given to it for tire manipulation at California. It’s asked for a deferral of suspensions pending the appeal, but that would only matter if the appeal isn’t heard next week. With the off-weekend, there’s more time for NASCAR to hold the appeal for the team. While there’s a chance it won’t be held until after the Texas race, our guess is it happens sometime next week.
It’s appropriate to start with our tire questions then, right?
This is the unavoidable question, isn’t it? As we pointed out when the penalties were announced (75 points for Newman, a six-race suspension for three crew members including crew chief Luke Lambert), Newman had 10 top-10 finishes in the first 26 races of the season. In the Chase, he had six, including a run of five straight starting at Dover.
And the speed he showed at the end of the year has carried over to 2015 with four top-10 finishes in the first six races.
Given the information at hand, there’s no way to say that RCR did manipulate the tires on the No. 31 last year. But there’s also no way to completely prove that they didn’t, barring an investigation of the tires that it used at Homestead. And that may not even be possible at this point.
If Drew’s question is the unavoidable question, there are a host of others too. When did teams catch on? When did NASCAR hear enough to start investigating, subsequently leading to the “tire audits?” Given that NASCAR took tires before the race at Auto Club Speedway, it’s reasonable to assume that this was not a one-race infraction. We just may never know for sure how long this went on.
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How does letting air out of the tires helps the handling of the car? – Mandy
We’ve gotten a lot of questions about this after writing what we did on Friday.
In very basic terms, hot air occupies more space than cold air does. Tires get hotter the longer they’re on the car, which is why teams start tire runs with low air pressures in the tires. And tires with low air pressures have more grip.
By poking tiny holes into tires (small enough that the tire won’t go flat), the air pressure that builds up over the course of a run slowly escapes. Tire pressure stays lower, grip stays better, and, theoretically, speed increases.
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Nick how many tires that get shredded after the race,victory burnout are involved, Harvick shedded tires, or does the heated rubber seal the holes? – Bruce
Yes, a driver shredding his back tires after a burnout isn’t abnormal. It happens pretty regularly.
But if that was a defense to prevent inspection of manipulated tires, it’s not a very broad one. To avoid your tires being checked, you’d have to win the race. If you finished second or lower, you’re not going to have any excuses to burn down your tires.
Plus, you’d have to only be doing it on your final set of tires. Because nothing would stop any other set of tires from being taken and looked it. And you don’t know if your final set of tires will be on the car for five laps, 10 laps or 50 laps.
Last year’s Martinsville race had a 3.8 rating. This year’s, on Fox Sports 1 instead of Fox, had a 2.5 rating. It was the lowest rating for a NASCAR race since 2002.
However, it’s not much of a surprise. Ratings are widely expected to be considerably lower on FS1 and NBC Sports Network because they don’t have the recognition or distribution as broadcast networks do.
But, and here’s a key but, it was still the highest-rated non-NCAA Tournament sporting event of the weekend. That’s a win for NASCAR, and a 2.5 rating is pretty damn good for FS1, which is still struggling for a foothold outside of NASCAR programming.
And remember, the move to FS1 and NBCSN for races has a double-objective. While NASCAR is getting a ton of money over the next 10 years, both networks have anchor programming for their fledgling networks. They can also use that programming to demand to be on all of the basic cable tiers of major television providers.
A sixth of the way through the season is too early to make a rash judgment, but if the season doesn’t improve, yes, it’s entirely possible a change could be made. And hell, maybe there could be a repeat of 2011 with Stewart’s title run and Darian Grubb’s departure.
But that’s a long way off and switching crew chiefs isn’t always an applicable solution to speed issues. And if a change was made post-2015, Stewart would be on his third crew chief since Grubb and fourth in six seasons. That’s downright English Premier League-like.
It’d have to be something that’s uniform across the board, and while there’s time for qualifying on Saturday on some track schedules, there isn’t on others.
And you can make the effective argument that practice is more important than qualifying if it’s a question of bumping practice for qualifying to make sure it happened. Teams get a chance to work on their cars in race setups and there also aren’t 50 cars showing up to the track every week. Right now, less than a handful of cars are going home. And they’re generally very small low-budget teams.
Brian’s Reese’s comment also leads us to the non-racing part of Happy Hour. In our tweet soliciting questions, we promised to talk about Easter candy.
Here’s our Easter Candy Power Rankings. We can all agree that Peeps are the worst, right?
1. Cadbury Creme Eggs
2. Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs
3. Cadbury Mini Eggs
4. Caramel/Peanut Butter filled bunnies
5. Snickers Eggs
6. Solid chocolate bunnies
7. Easter M&Ms (just because there’s no taste difference)
8. Anything else not Peeps
1,000,000. Peeps
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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
