Do you know that teams in NASCAR spend a massive amount of money behind tires? It’s obvious because the high speed leads to rapid wear and tear and hence has to be timely changed. Alongside the quantity, the quality matters too. They should be rugged and have the best grip, the best materials, and the freshest tires possible for gaining a competitive advantage.

When quantity meets quality, a huge bill is produced. However, what is the exact amount of money a team spends on tires? Stop scratching your heads as Joe Gibbs Racing in a recent Instagram video gives out a detailed breakdown of the costs. And the amount is truly shocking!

How much do the Goodyear tires cost, per Joe Gibbs Racing?

Tires are a commodity that the NASCAR teams cannot compromise on as they play such a detrimental role in a race. JGR’s Denny Hamlin, in an episode of Actions Detrimental, has previously spoken about the huge amount of tires the teams buy. Each weekend when teams arrive at the track, a Goodyear truck will be stocked with hundreds of sets of tires. Each race has a maximum allotment of tires that can be used.

According to Hamlin, once the teams buy the tires from Goodyear they cannot be returned. Even unused ones cannot be reimbursed. He had said, “Say we go to Texas this weekend and they give us eight sets of tires. If we use six, we don’t get a rebate on those two. We do not get reimbursed for those tires. If we have a leftover set, $2,400 a piece or whatever they might be, we can’t just turn them back into Goodyear and get a refund. They tell us ‘you’re buying these sets of tires and they’re yours now, you can do whatever you want with them.” 

To understand the amount of money teams spend on tires, we need to look at the quantity the teams use. In a recent Instagram video, Joe Gibbs Racing has explained every detail. It’s said in the video, “Events such as the clash requires to have five sets of tires. While others such as the Coke 600 require us to have 14 sets. At this point in the year, we have had 24 race weekends, and our team has four cars. Each car needed 246 sets of tires, meaning our total of 985 sets, which is 3940 tires.” The video takes into account 2/3 of the year, where the team needs almost 4,000 tires.

Further in the JGR video, they dwell on the price of each set and eventually calculate the total cost. It’s said in the video, “It is $550 a pop, the total is 2.167 million dollars.” That’s a lot! Alone JGR needs so many tires, it’s simple maths to calculate how many all the teams in the NASCAR series use; It’s an expensive affair! But what happens to the used tires?

What happens to the used tires?

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Hamlin further shares that the tires cannot be reused by teams for other races. They age and will not perform to their maximum capacity. Reiterating the same, Hamlin said, “They’ll put them in inventory. Let’s say we go to Kansas next weekend, we likely would tap into that extra set and say ‘OK, we’re going to practice on those tires.’ But if Kansas is three, four months down the road we’re not going to want old date codes. We’re not going to want older tires because they age. Rubber ages and it changes compounds. It’s funny when you get older tires, that can really mess up a car. So it just goes to waste.”

Each year so many tires go to waste. According to Hamlin, they do. It’s understandable for used tyres but what about unused ones? Hamlin further in the podcast gives us the scale of tires that go to waste along with the money spent on it. He said, “How much JGR had an extra tire inventory in the first year of next-gen, 2022? How much money was spent and never ran? Nearly one million! Nearly one million dollars worth of tires, that JGR spent on tires that it never ran.”

What do you think of the amount of money teams spend on tires by NASCAR teams? What do you think can be done to tackle and reuse the tires? Let us know in the comments below.