If you had to wheel a car the way that Tony Stewart did on Sunday during the Kobalt Tools 500 at Atlanta, you might be a little agitated afterwards too. Tony wasn’t alone however as almost every driver on the track could be seen fighting the wheel as their cars took on an attitude more like a Saturday night late model in the A-Main.

The criticism was quickly directed at the tire manufacturer Goodyear, but they might not be all to blame for the issues. It’s been discussed thousands of time how Goodyear has chosen to “err on the side of safety” and with some of the events at Vegas still in recent memory they did exactly what most figured they would, bring a really hard tire to Atlanta.

The dynamics of the COT are still largely an unknown at most of the tracks on the circuit to the teams, NASCAR and Goodyear. Throw into the mix some borderline controversial decisions by NASCAR to remain with the “bump-stop” configuration and what the teams are experimenting with in order to gain grip and you have all of the ingredients for this type of scenario to unfold. Goodyear was obviously spooked with the recent, unexplained tire failures and maybe went too far on the side of safety.

Is Goodyear totally at fault on this? Taking into consideration the above mentioned unknowns and that aggressive camber/caster settings by the teams could have possibly contributed to the earlier tire failures and your answer might be no. The teams are not willing to show their cards on what they are experimenting with for the obvious reasons of not wanting to give away even the slightest advantage, but then that leaves Goodyear working without all of the needed data in race conditions. Fans don’t want to see any further limits by NASCAR such as the gear rules or shocks, so to implement a maximum camber/caster allowance wouldn’t go over too well. Without this Goodyear is going to keep bringing “bowling balls” to the track until trial by error works out the details. They are in overkill mode right now.

As controversial as it might be, a possible solution could be to bring multiple tire compounds to each race, soft, medium and hard and let the teams figure out which one best suits their set-up, driver’s preference, pit strategy and assumed risk for all of the above. If the teams have a choice then in affect the teams are responsible for their selection of compounds, not Goodyear. It would add a whole new element to the strategy and racing and allow some teams to make better gains with certain gambles over and above just tire pressure and wedge adjustments to correct handling issues with their cars. The different compounds would just be an added adjustment available to the teams until they determined the optimum configuration for the current track conditions.

The fact that the gain on a short run with a softer compound tire would level itself by requiring more frequent pit stops and vice versa with a harder compound means that having a choice would not give any one particular team an advantage, but merely the option to try some different strategy. In addition, if a driver is complaining that the set of tires on his car is too hard then he has the option to try something different and to experience the downside to the alternative if that’s what he chooses.

The teams are intelligent enough to understand what the trade-offs are with all types of compounds, so give them the choice and let them be accountable for their own decisions instead of force feeding them one type of tire for the entire race.

It may be a little hectic for the drivers and teams at first as well as for the fans to understand the strategies, but everyone would get a handle on it probably a lot quicker than Goodyear will the way they are going about it currently. The way that the pit reporting is done in this day and age, it’s not like there would be any secrets to what compound the different teams were on and as far as that goes the tires could have different colored lettering in order to distinguish them even more.