Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 12, 1993 TAG: 9306120132
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LONG POND, PA. LENGTH: Medium
Schrader pushed his Chevrolet Lumina to a lap of 162.816 mph around this 2.5-mile tri-oval to win the top starting spot for Sunday's Champion 500 and surpass his track record of 162.499 mph set last year.
Mark Martin, who qualified second in a Ford Thunderbird at 162.534 mph, and Hut Stricklin, who was third fastest in another Ford at 162.508 mph, also broke the old track record. Also among the top five were two other Chevy drivers - rookie Jeff Gordon at 161.903 mph and Dale Earnhardt at 161.894 mph.
Schrader and most of the other drivers who qualified Friday used new Eagle race tires with the "Goodyear" name painted in yellow on the sidewalls.
But Goodyear arrived here with hundreds of older white-painted tires that the teams also had to accept. And although company officials said there was no difference in the compound, Schrader and others were convinced there was a difference in performance.
"The yellow tires are newer, so we knew they had to be fresher," he said. "And there ain't no tire like a fresh tire. It's just fresher rubber."
Bobby Hillin Jr., who qualified 19th, told Ford's Wayne Estes: "Everybody said those yellow-letter tires were worth a couple of tenths [of a second], and I think they were right."
"Everybody has been running these white Goodyear tires - the ones with the white letters on them - left over from last year," Kyle Petty told Pontiac's Brian Hoagland. "We put on the new stuff and it worked pretty good."
Petty, using the yellow Goodyears, qualified eighth fastest.
It really wasn't a controversy because Goodyear treated everybody the same. Each team has to accept three four-tire sets of the white-lettered, 1992 tires for the weekend.
And since teams are limited to three sets of tires for practice and qualifying, each team received two white sets and one yellow set Friday. Most teams saved the yellow tires for the time trials.
"The tires are identical, except for the color of the sidewall," said Wayne Torrence, Goodyear's field representative. "The [white-sidewall] tires are left over from last year. We had quantity enough that we couldn't afford to scrap them.
"Some teams thought the yellow tires were faster, and some thought the whites were faster."
But Schrader, for one, wasn't buying that.
"The newer tires made a difference," he said.
There have been reports circulating in the garage that some teams may be injecting a chemical inside the tires to soften the rubber or the sidewalls - from the inside out - to make them stick to the track better and enhance performance.
If so, it would be a variation of the well-known but obsolete tactic of soaking tires in a chemical to make the rubber stickier. That tactic no longer is used because NASCAR has developed a so-called "sniffer" device that detects the chemical.
"I have not heard" about tires being injected with chemicals, Torrence said. "I'm not going to tell you that isn't happening, but I don't know of anything like that that's going to soften the tire on the outside and not deteriorate the hell out of something," making the tire unsafe and unreliable.
A second round of time trials will begin at 10:30 a.m. today. Among those participating will be Derricke Cope, Dale Jarrett, Morgan Shepherd, Harry Gant, Terry Labonte and Darrell Waltrip.
Keywords:
AUTO RACING
by CNB