As bad luck continued for the second consecutive week at the inaugural NASCAR Cup Series race at Iowa Speedway, Denny Hamlin finished at P24. He finally had the time to sit and look back at what transpired. Discussions took a familiar turn—Goodyear’s recurring 2024 tire mystery on, yet again, a short track. Were drivers on the field not able to foresee tire troubles on race day? Absolutely not. Here’s the catch.

Only this past Friday, five drivers faced tire issues during the 50-minute practice session at repaved 0.875-mile Iowa, all around the 20-lap mark. Tyler Reddick, Ty Gibbs, and Ross Chastain were the three involved with minor consequences with no major damage to the car. However, JGR’s Christopher Bell and Team Penske’s Austin Cindric would be relegated to start from the back of the pack following right-front blowouts. Their respective vehicles accumulated enough damage through contact with the wall and had to resort to backup cars for the race day on Sunday.

On race day, 10 incidents plagued the Iowa Corn 350 with half of those problems courtesy of failures on the Goodyear radials. At the post-race release of Hamlin’s Actions Detrimental, co-host Jared Allen certainly noticed the discrepancies as he asked Hamlin, “We saw a handful of blown tires in practice and then you saw a handful of tire wear, blown tires in the race. What was your assessment of this and how that went?”

Offering his expert assessment, the #11 driver painted quite the contrary narrative, “I thought it was better than what it was in practice. I mean, we saw it was around lap 20 or 25 in practice, guys were blowing out tires. And I do think that teams made adjustments as well, to help with that.”

What was surprising during practice was that Bell, Brad Keselowski, and Kyle Larson were there when a Goodyear tire test was held on the same track less than a month ago. Bell reflected on his experiences then saying, “We were just here, what, a month ago? And we did 50-lap runs, like all day long, and had no issues at all. I never had a tire problem at all. It caught me off guard and it caught my team off guard as well.” Apparently, it was around 15 degrees warmer than the tire test on May 28, and many drivers, including Bell, owed this to be the reason for the chaos.

The Xfinity race’s return to Iowa became a topic of online criticism as it registered 12 DNFs for the first time in the 2024 NXS season. Unlike Bell and others, Denny didn’t think overheating was what caused the tire troubles.  He said, “Our problems were different than the Xfinity cars. They had a heat problem. So just a lot of heat, so they were blistering quite bad… It is pretty flat so the tire is always making contact with the asphalt. So it’s just creating a ton of heat and a lot of friction. And then in the Cup cars, it was more of a shoulder issue – air pressure, cambers, things like that.

“Ours was definitely a different problem than Xfinity. So I wasn’t too concerned going into our race,” confessed Hamlin.

He explained how “cambers” referred to the implemented adjustments to the ’tilt’ of the wheels which helped the car “corner better” on certain setups. Finally, Allen would ask Denny if he ‘would tell Goodyear to go softer.’ He echoed the demands of ‘softer tires’ like his Dirty Mo Media Network colleague and owner Dale Earnhardt Jr did after North Wilkesboro to answer,

“I think on the left. Yes. I think the left-side tire still has some room for the compound itself to be softer. That would allow more tire falloff because the times still, flatlined really for all 90 laps. They didn’t gain speed or lose speed. They just stayed the same. It certainly could cause some tires to wear out if you put a softer left-side. And as the racetrack starts to wear out as well, it should allow you to run a softer compound.”

About a month from his runners-up placement at North Wilkesboro’s All-Star race at the season’s last outing on a short track, Joe Gibbs’ veteran #11 rolled off the grid in P12. In Iowa, corded tires in the first stage and a collision with Kyle Larson in the last may not have left Hamlin feeling too good, having lost twelve track positions when the 2024 Iowa Corn 350 finally waved its chequered. Ryan Blaney became Iowa’s first-ever champion there.

Goodyear brought the same “prime” tire setups from the All-Star race in June to Iowa this weekend. Although the race saw the lead change 17 times over 350 circuits, the tire gremlins were prevalent again on a repaved racetrack that many speculated would birth single-lane short-track racing with no visible fix. For reference, one can look back to Denny Hamlin’s triumph at Bristol’s return to concrete.

The NASCAR nation witnessed the lead change a record-breaking 54 times, and only about one-third of the field in a race largely marred by unnatural tire fall-off! Even the All-Star race saw Joey Logano dominate the whole event, leading all laps but one to win a million dollars in North Wilkesboro!

Dale Jr was a little distressed by the sub-par racing experience of this particular event. After all, he had worked so hard for the track to get up and running as part of the NASCAR schedule. Following these mysterious events on another repaved racetrack in Wilkes County, many believed the Goodyears were the problem and not the racetracks. Dale Jr had urged NASCAR’s slicks suppliers to “push the tire and get more aggressive with the tire. Because I don’t think the tracks are broken…” His primary demand, however, was softer tires.

As Denny shelled his answer to Jared Allen, he also fell 38 points behind the current table leader Chase Elliott due to his 24th-place finish at Iowa. On the other hand, the #11 did manage to pick up some much-needed playoff points by finishing 6th in the second stage. As it happened, another Hendrick driver finished on the podium as runners-up, William Byron. However, the real story for Denny Hamlin heading out of the week has been his unruly contact with Byron and Elliott’s teammate, Kyle Larson at the beginning of Stage 3.

Denny takes the blame for Kyle Larson’s misery

After winning the pole and leading around 80 laps, Larson was edged on the lead for good by eventual winner Ryan Blaney on the 88th rotation of the circuit. He even won Stage 2 and finished behind Stage 1 winner Blaney, who consequently led a race-high 201 laps.

But the incident involving Denny Hamlin & Daniel Suarez on the backstretch made it hard for the #5 to recover its early pace and it eventually finished dead last among all running cars in the field at P34, with 36 laps remaining. Hamlin took full “responsibility” for Larson’s heartbreak admitting to Bob Pockrass post-race, “It was my mistake, I gassed up too soon and ran into the back of him…”

Although initially frustrated over the radio by getting spun by the car he had lapped earlier in the race, Larson would later talk to Pockrass about the issue and told him, “I doubt it was intentional; I wouldn’t see why it would be intentional.” 

With all the dust now settling at Iowa, the NASCAR season moves to New Hampshire Motor Speedway, a track slightly above just a mile. Denny’s teammate Martin Truex Jr is the defending champ at Loudon, but the air suggests a new winner emerge at the USA Today 301 on June 23rd.