When asked if there was any circumstance that might drive Goodyear from nitro drag racing, Ashbee replied, “Certainly financial situations change, but I don’t see anything on the horizon that would send us away from the sport. We’re here because we enjoy it, we learn from it and we choose to be here.”

Is this problem simply a matter of the unintended consequences of having made just one company the sole supplier of tires for the nitro classes? Would competition from other tire manufacturers improve the product? The point may be moot. At Indianapolis, Faron Lubbers from Hoosier Racing Tires explained his company’s position saying, “With what is going on now with the tires in Top Fuel, Hoosier is not really interested.”

In the Indy staging lanes Connie Kalitta, who has had many chunking problems of his own with both front and rear tires, thought that the problems may be a matter of the tire

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company not taking enough time to “cure” each tire, that Goodyear was behind schedule in the manufacturing process and was shipping the tires too early. 

“Maybe what they are referring to is the freshness of the tires,” responded Ashbee. “There’s no question we were crunched at Denver, but we got them there. They are being built properly and being sent out to the racetrack. They are very fresh tires, but we certainly didn’t shortcut any of the manufacturing process. They get the normal cure.  We do know for a fact that once you run a tire, any tire, through a heat cycle it puts a little additional cure on it; that’s in a sense an aging process.”

There may be some correlation between a driver pedalling the car on a run and the incidence of chunking, it may very well be the total down force throughout a run, but it is clear that this is continually happening to a small number of teams who are having the majority of the chunking problems. It is not across the board among all TF teams.

In the same early Sunday qualifying round, Top Fuel rookie Morgan Lucas had a slightly different chunking problem than Dixon’s with one slick and both front tires. However, the Amato dragster’s rear tire had pieces the size of a fist missing and a couple of large blistered chunks that hadn’t yet separated from the tire’s base. Some of those missing pieces flew off and bent the dragster’s rear wing strut. One crew chief told us that the Goodyear engineers had told him that when a chunk of tire comes of a tire at around 300 mph it impacts with 80,000 psi of force.

It was deja vu for the Amato team’s crew chief, Wayne Dupuy, who withdrew his car, declining to make a fifth and final qualifying attempt after the tires chunked during the fourth round of qualifying.  “I wasn’t comfortable,” said Dupuy about his decision to withdraw.

We talked to yet another team sponsor about the tire problem. Major NHRA sponsor, sponsor of the Joe Amato-owned team, and parents of Top Fuel driver Morgan Lucas, Forrest Lucas and his wife, Charlotte.

“It certainly is more personal now,” Mrs. Lucas said about her concerns for her son while driving a Top Fuel car and the tire problems.

“We don’t want anything to happen to Morgan,” her husband added. “This is a dangerous sport to start with, but when you throw in a factor of any tires or mechanical problem, that brings mortality a little closer to home. The crew is the one that’s really getting ate-up with this thing, the fact that this could happen again. Wayne (Dupuy) is extremely distraught, more so than anybody. When he came back and saw the (chunked) tire...well, he just came apart.”

After that session Dupuy joined Tony Schumacher’s U.S. Army dragster team in deciding to put on a brand new set of tires every run.  Forest Lucas commented on that decision.

“Apparently, if you put on a brand new set of tires for each run... you can kinda get by, but that’s $1100 per run. Now, we shouldn’t be spending an extra $1100 per run every time the car runs a quarter of a mile. I remember they had tires you could make several runs on and then give them or sell them to an alcohol driver. So what’s happened? From what I understand the Goodyear people say they lost that formula, well what kind of story is that...? I can’t go along with that.”