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GOOD YEAR FOR GOODYEARS
In an effort to reduce the tire failures that Top Fuel dragsters and Fuel Coupes running at or over 330 mph (a speed Goodyear engineers probably never imagined happening when the tire was originally designed) have been experiencing for the last few years, Goodyear has developed a new "spec" tire for Top Fuel and Fuel Coupes. That tire was actually produced and tested last year and, in fact, was on Kenny Bernstein's Top Fuel car when he set the NHRA Top Fuel elapsed time record at Route 66 late last year. Many of the teams at both the Phoenix and Tucson test sessions were having some problems adjusting to the new tires. DRO talked to Austin Coil about the new tire at Phoenix. He was happy with the performance of the tires and, on his final test the car ran incremental numbers that were better than the team's best from the 2001 season.
According to Coil the major differences between last year's tire and the new spec tire was the new tire has both a stiffer sidewall and a stiffer tread surface. Coil told DRO that part of the problem with last year's Fuel tire was that the tread surface actually "cupped" when the tire was at high speeds. He went on to say that, as he understood it, this lack of surface contact didn't allow the tire to transfer enough of the heat generated by the tire spinning back to the surface of the track and may have contributed to the some of the failures. Reportedly, the new design will solve some of those problems. Coil told DRO that as far as he could tell, the new "spec" tire worked
fine in cool weather and on a cool track and the only thing that was
left was to see how the tire would work in hot weather and on a hot
track. |
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