Greg Stucker of Goodyear confirmed this week the company will hold a tire test on the oval at Indianapolis Motor Speedway next month.
It will be a two-day test held Monday and Tuesday, Aug. 14 and 15. That is after the NASCAR weekend concludes for the Xfinity Series and Cup Series on the road course.
“We just feel like there’s enough discussion around potentially going back to the oval in the future, let’s go ahead and take the opportunity to get on that racetrack in the old configuration with the Next Gen car,” Stucker told SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. “We haven’t run the Next Gen car on the oval, we’ve only run the road course.
“I hate to bring it up, but the last time we took a new car to Indianapolis, it didn’t fair too terribly well from a tire perspective. So, we want to stay ahead of that — we want to get a first look at it so that if that decision is made at some point in the future to go back to the oval, then at least we have a good starting point with this car so then we can go from there.”
[lawrence-auto-related count=3 category=1428]
NASCAR switched from competing on the oval to the road course in 2020 with the Xfinity Series followed by the Cup Series in 2021. The Cup Series visited Indianapolis for the first time in 1994 on the oval.
“We always feel like we need to go back a couple of times at Indy and test and get prepared for an oval race if that’s going to be the decision,” Stucker continued. “We feel like it’s a good opportunity to go ahead and run, gather some data, see where it stands. We haven’t run that oval for a while, so we’ll see how that surface has aged over the course of a few years since we’ve run there. (It) just seems like a good time to put a mark in the sand and decide what we would need to do if, in fact, we do decide to take that step.”
Next year is the 30th anniversary of the inaugural Brickyard 400 (Aug. 6, 1994). Jeff Gordon won that event, the first of five victories for Gordon at the speedway.