This weekend’s NHRA SummitRacing.com Nationals will see the debut of a new-compound of drag slick for Top Fuel and Funny Car racers. Traditionally, this results in hours of television coverage of crew chiefs scratching their heads and blaming all the ills of the world on said new tire. We’re not sure if the new compound is supposed to work toward reducing chunking (the tendency of the slicks on these cars to shed chunks of their “tread” section at the top end of the track) or if there is another motive.
Teams will still be able to use the old tire until stocks are depleted to the level that they are no longer available for purchase to all teams. It is expected that everyone will be running the new tire by the NHRA event in St Louis.
The interesting wrinkle (Get it? slicks, wrinkle) in this whole equation is the NHRA restriction on testing. In the past, teams would suffer for a race trying to sort out the new rubber and then spend every available second testing on the new tires to get them figured out and get their tune-ups lined up with the performance of the new slick. NHRA rules severely limit any type of testing, so most of the learning on these babies will be done under live fire conditions.
The chunking issue that these cars have had over the last several seasons is both scary and expensive. If you can picture a slick with big hunks of tread missing, like someone removed them with a knife, you can visualize a chunked tire. This can cause the tires to fail at 300 mph, which is not a good scenario for the driver. On the financial side, we heard from good sources that many teams were getting one run out of a set of $1500 slicks at the recently completed 4-Wide Nationals due to the problem.
This ought to be very interesting.
Source — Racer.com — NHRA to Debut New Top Fuel/Funny Car Tire at Las Vegas
