Quote:
Originally Posted by Sean Ward
no one but goodyear makes tires for nitro cars
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Exactly, and that's exactly why this is not true. If NHRA is concerned about safety, there's no way that they're going to ban the ONLY manufacturer that currently makes tires for the fuel cars for another manufacturer that has NO experience making tires for the fuel cars.
I personally don't run Goodyears, so I wouldn't care one way or the other, but over the years NHRA has had a very close working relationship with Goodyear, so if anything is going to change with the tires NHRA allows, I'm sure Goodyear will have the right of first refusal (I'm sure the other tire manufacturers reps can tell you how frustrating that has been for them!)
Now, all that said, that doesn't mean that Goodyear won't pull out of making drag racing tires in 2008. I don't think that's likely either, but nobody can force Goodyear to make tires for drag racing. So, if senior management at Goodyear decides that making drag racing tires isn't worth their investment (e.g. they feel they get a better return making racing tires for NASCAR), then bye-bye Goodyear drag tires. But again, given Goodyear's involvement in drag racing over the years, that seems unlikely to me.
On a slightly different but related note, for those of you that never tried Mickey Thompson tires, they're worth a try. I ran Goodyears for many, many years, and then one day got a smoking deal on a set of M/Ts. Now, unless there are extenuating circumstances, I'll only run M/Ts or Hoosiers. I had to cut my wheelie bars to fit the sidewall of the Hoosiers (funny thing is that I was forced into buying the Hoosiers because I needed tires, M/T wasn't at the track, and Goodyear didn't have any 14x32s on the truck), but the M/Ts fit just as well as the Goodyears.
What I like about the M/Ts (and the Hoosiers) is that I found them to be much more consistent over their lifetime. Where with the Goodyears I would get 40 great runs, and then 40 decent runs, and then 20 - 40 mediocre runs (if I stretched them that far), with the M/Ts (and the Hoosiers) I got 150 good runs. I was literally running my M/Ts on cords, and my 60' times were just as good as they were when they were brand new (seriously...I looked at my log book because I was sure that running them on cords had to be costing me E.T., but it wasn't.) Now, I don't run a real high HP combo, so I won't say that everyone would get the same results, but I was sold.