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What Are the Types of Tires in NASCAR? Dirt, Rain, Snow Tires and More

Published 04/21/2021, 10:30 AM EDT

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The quick advancement of road tires in recent years owes a lot to the constant development inside motorsports like NASCAR. Goodyear made the Eagle Radial Race Tire as the supplier of tires for NASCAR. They implement the learnings from races straightforwardly into their normal tires, like the Eagle High-Performance traveler tire.

The wheels that groups utilize are 15 inches, with rim widths of 9.5/10 inches. The Goodyear Eagle race tires are 28/10-15 and slick. They weigh 24 pounds and have a thickness of just 1/8 inch.

The tires are bald, but this permits the most extreme contact with the circuit. This makes for ideal footing as the tires need all the surface possible to perform.

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USA Today via Reuters

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Types of tires used in NASCAR races

NASCAR decides which tire compounds, i.e. the material the tires are made of, will be used on each track for each race. While a soft compound can give more grasp, a harder compound lasts longer. However, a soft compound wears quickly.

Each track makes tires wear in an unexpected way. Track surface, number of turns, the snugness of turns, and kind of banking are the factors that decide how a tire will wear.

Since tires are important for drivers’ safety, NASCAR and Goodyear have decided the best mixtures for tires for each track, and these are the tire intensifies that the groups are needed to utilize.

Various sorts of tires are Dry, Rain, Dirt, and Snow.

Dry tires

The most regularly utilized tires in a NASCAR race are the Dry ones. On a dry track, tires can create more footing if a greater amount of the rubber is in contact with the ground.

Rain tires

NASCAR as of late tried the rain tires with the goal that the races can occur during rain. In addition, it was tried on the Martinsville Speedway by drivers Chris Buescher and Kyle Larson.

“I don’t really have much wet-weather experience, so it was kind of cool to figure that out,” Larson said.

“Honestly didn’t drive way different. You could still slow down good, turn good. Drive-off was easy to spin your tires, but other than that, it was kind of fun to chase the grip throughout the portions where it would start drying.

“So it was pretty fun and yeah, I think they’ve got a pretty good product that we could honestly start racing with right away if we needed to on these short tracks.”

NASCAR added the Bristol dirt race to the calendar after almost 30 years. For the first time since 1970, NASCAR driver raced on a dirt track. The Bristol Motor Speedway was temporarily converted into a half-mile dirt track.

Dirt tires

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The dirt tires are very not the same as the dry tires; they have a tread design on them. The tread pattern helps to slow the degradation of the tires and makes them last longer.

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Snow tires

On March 26, 2021, for the first time, NASCAR drove a race vehicle on snow. NASCAR Whelen Euro Series Team took the EuroNASCAR vehicles to the mountains to finish an entire day of testing on ice. Above all, it was driven by NASCAR Whelen Euro Series President and CEO Jerome Galpin.

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Written by:

Abhay Aggarwal

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Abhay Aggarwal is sports analyst at EssentiallySports. Having joined ES in early 2020, he has over 300 NASCAR, Formula 1, and Tennis articles to his name. Abhay has been an avid motorsports fan for over a decade, and he even attended the inaugural Indian Grand Prix in 2011.
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