Photo by Larry N. Souders / After being openly critical of their product throughout the week, Tony Stewart met with Goodyear officials Friday at Bristol Motor Speedway.
By Wes Holtsclaw (wholtsclaw@starhq.com)
The biggest current story in NASCAR might be reaching a productive conclusion.
After voicing his concern with Goodyear throughout the previous week, former Sprint Cup champion Tony Stewart met with Goodyear’s General Manager of Worldwide Racing Stu Grant Friday at Bristol.
Grant and Stewart both called the meeting productive.
Stewart expressed his concerns and opinions, while Grant explained the Goodyear process.
“I was pleased with the meeting,” Grant said. “It was an excellent meeting. It was constructive. It was extremely worthwhile to sit down and have a discussion with him. Tony was able to express his concerns and I listened to his concerns. I was able to explain our process and we both talked about how, moving forward, we can improve the process of developing tires together.”
Stewart said his comments made last week at Atlanta were made in frustration and made to get Goodyear’s attention.
He also noted after the meeting that he overlooked what kind of effect his comments had on the company and offered an apology folks who work for the company that have nothing to do with the racing aspect.
“I want to apologize to the people who work in the factories and the union workers at Goodyear,” Stewart said. “We realize that they’re working hard just like everybody else, and we realize that Goodyear as a whole works hard too. But our comments last week were not meant to offend those people, because they’re not the ones making the decisions about the racing tires we use here at the track.”
Stewart also said he didn’t mean to offend Goodyear’s workers at the track, specifically folks who mount and dismount tires, and work the unloading and loading trucks.
“A lot of those people have become friends over the years, and that’s another group of people we didn’t mean to offend with our comments. Our comments were strong to get somebody’s attention high up in corporate at Goodyear. It wasn’t meant to offend anyone else,” he said.
Drivers openly supported Stewart’s comments concerning the tire last weekend at Atlanta. There were some drivers, including Jeff Gordon, who thought Stewart took the tire fiasco too personal.
At the end of the day, however, Stewart stands by his opinion.
In his driver press conference earlier Friday, Stewart said he hadn’t heard from Goodyear.
The company said throughout the week that they were going to improve the tires, but Stewart said he didn’t want to hear anything. He wanted to see results.
“I don’t want to hear what they’re doing, I don’t want to hear what they want to do, I don’t want to hear what they’re planning on doing — I just want to see what happens and see what the end result of that is. As long as that’s a better deal then we’ll be back on their side, but they have some work to do.”
Stewart had NASCAR President Mike Helton on his radio show earlier in the week and they disagreed on a couple of aspects with the tires.
At the end of the day, Stewart role as the ‘voice in the garage’ increased.
“It’s not like everything we say is because of that and that’s not our reasoning behind doing what we’re doing,” Stewart said. “We said what we said last week to get somebody’s attention and it got their attention.
“Obviously I was really vocal about what I said. The thing is that you shouldn’t have to get to that point. The problem is that we’ve been in this situation with them before and trying to do it the right way and trying to do it behind closed doors and trying to be politically correct about it, but we didn’t get results. Obviously this week it got somebody’s attention that can do something and make a difference now.”
Stewart said he didn’t think tires would be a problem this weekend.
“It wasn’t (a problem) in the fall last year,” he added. “I thought it was good. Anytime that you can take your car and go from the top to the bottom of the track and back, you obviously have the grip you need to go where you want to go. Having that flexibility is what we’re all looking for.”
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