NASCAR Sprint Cup racing was graced with one of the most beautiful weekends Central Indiana could offer with mild temperatures and crystal clear skies during the final weekend of July.The sanctioning body, and its tire supplier (who's problems earlier in the season caught a little bit of Smoke, if you will) Goodyear, though, managed to turn one of the most-consistently awesome Brickyard race weekends in to a total mess.
As I'm sure none of you will soon forget, the July's Allstate 400 at the Brickyard -- also known as the legendary Indianapolis Motor Speedway -- was marred by a complete failure of the tire compound brought by Goodyear for one of the season's crown jewel events.
Indy was one of three races that yours truly had the chance to cover first hand, and following the final Saturday practice while standing behind Kurt Busch's No. 2 car, I noticed something I had never seen before. Black powder, or rather granulated rubber, was sticking to the rear quarter-panels and trunk cover after less than a handful of laps turned around the 2.5-mile oval.
That powder, it turns out, was a direct foresight into what NASCAR fans were about to experience the next day.
Ultimately, the race turned into a synchronized display among all of the drivers to simply make it to the next "competition caution" that NASCAR would call every 10-14 laps of the event in order to get each driver on pit road before he found himself buried in the Turn 1 wall thanks to a blown tire.
Amazingly, it wasn't the slowest Brickyard run on record, but it certainly was the most frustrating as drivers merely raced the race track under green flag conditions and then tried to make up spots on pit road. Jimmie Johnson, who had by far the best handling car of the day, used his pit crew's skill to keep the lead for most of the day and walk away with his second Brickyard win.
Fans at home and at the track were livid with NASCAR (Me? Not so much because I learned quickly to just enjoy how on-the-edge each sprint was and how the end of the race strategy would turn out if the leaders pushed hard for the win) and let them know about it for weeks.
NASCAR, and Goodyear, both took blame for the conditions and stated a lack of testing and work with the new car at the flat, high-speed track as the cause for the problems and vowed to fix them with extensive testing before the 2009 edition.
That testing began in September with more expected in the spring months of 2009 to make sure such a disaster doesn't happen again.
Sure, it wasn't a highlight of the season, but the Brickyard Blowout is certainly a memory we'll have for a long time.
