Goodyear Fast Facts — Las Vegas
NASCAR Cup Series — Race No. 33 – 267 laps / 400.5 miles
Las Vegas Motor Speedway (1.5-mile oval) – Las Vegas, Nev.
Fast Facts for October 19-20, 2024
Tire: Goodyear Eagle 18-inch Speedway Radials
Set limits: Cup: 1 set for practice, 1 set for qualifying and 9 sets for the race
(8 race sets plus 1 set transferred from qualifying)
Tire Codes:
Left-side — D-5186; Right-side — D-5222
Tire Circumference:
Left-side — 2,263 mm (89.09 in.); Right-side — 2,277 mm (89.65 in.)
Minimum Recommended Inflation:
Left Front — 20 psi; Left Rear — 22 psi;
Right Front — 50 psi; Right Rear — 46 psi
Storyline – The search for grip in the desert: The NASCAR Cup Series races on a wide range of tracks over the course of a season. From the material used in the track surface to the amount of banking in the corners to the radii of those corners to the abrasiveness of the track surface, all those factors go into designing a tire set-up for a particular facility. Las Vegas Motor Speedway has traditionally not produced high tire wear, and when tires don’t wear it allows heat to build up causing a loss of grip.
What Goodyear has done for its Las Vegas set-up is design its tread compounds to wear more, having more heat dissipate through the tread and allowing the tire to run at a more optimal level. Understanding that teams want to maintain as much grip in their tires as possible, one way they do that is reducing the air pressure in their tires. Goodyear recommends that teams observe the minimum posted air pressures so tires don’t over-deflect and cause damage to the sidewall.
“With Las Vegas being a low tire wear track, we have done several things in recent years with the tire set-up,” said Greg Stucker, Goodyear’s director of racing. “From the tread compound side, we bring a tire that encourages wear which, in turn, helps manage the heat in the tire. A tire that wears runs relatively ‘cooler’ over the course of a run.
Also, for this season, we introduced a construction update to the right-side tire that the Cup cars run at Las Vegas and several other tracks, and that gives teams a little more flexibility in using air pressures as a tuning tool in their search for maximum performance.”
Notes – Cup cars back on spring tire set-up at Las Vegas: Being on the 18-inch bead diameter tire, NASCAR Cup teams will run a different tire set-up than those in the Xfinity Series at Las Vegas this weekend . . . this is the same combination of left- and right-side tires that Cup teams ran at Las Vegas in March . . . Cup teams have also run this same tire set-up at Texas, Kansas (twice), Nashville and Pocono this season . . . with this 18-inch tire, and its lower profile sidewall, Cup cars do not run inner liners in any of their tires.