Tire Bleeding: Tiny Holes, Big Penalty
When Keeping the Air In Wasn’t Necessarily the Fastest Idea
Ryan Newman’s tires had a problem.
They held air.
Ordinarily that ranks fairly high on the list of desirable tire characteristics. Race tires complicate the discussion because pressure rises as they heat, changing the shape of the tire and the size of the contact patch as a run goes on.
Teams can start at lower pressure and wait for the tire to come to them, but then the early laps become the compromise.
There was another possibility.
Let a little air out while the car was racing.
The Garage Had Been Talking
By early 2015, NASCAR’s garage was full of rumors about tire bleeding. The basic idea was simple enough: instead of allowing pressure to climb normally as the tire heated, create a way for a tiny amount of air to escape.
Not enough to flatten the tire. Just enough to keep the pressure closer to the number the crew wanted.
The garage supplied plenty of theories about how to do it. Microscopic holes in the tire. Pinholes around the wheel. Something around the valve stem. Depending on who was telling the story, racers had found nearly as many places to let air escape as Goodyear had found places to keep it in.
NASCAR had heard the same rumors.
So NASCAR started collecting tires.
The Tire Wasn’t Finished When the Race Was
On March 22, 2015, Ryan Newman finished fifth in the Auto Club 400 at California’s Auto Club Speedway. Normally that would have been the useful part of the afternoon.
NASCAR had other plans.
Officials were conducting tire audits, and tires from several teams were collected for closer examination. Newman’s No. 31 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet was among them.
NASCAR’s engineers examined the tires, then sent some outside the organization for more detailed analysis.
That is when a race tire starts having a very bad week.
A normal inspection happens in the garage with gauges, templates and officials crawling around the car. This one continued after the transporter had gone home.
The tire was going to a laboratory.
NASCAR Found Enough
NASCAR never published a convenient little diagram showing exactly how every bit of air had escaped. The precise mechanics remained frustratingly vague.
What NASCAR did say was far more important.
The No. 31 team’s tires had been altered in a way that allowed air pressure to be released beyond normal pressure adjustments. NASCAR’s rules prohibited devices, modifications or procedures involving the tire, wheel or valve-stem hardware that released pressure while the car was running.
Whether the air escaped through one clever little opening or a hundred of them was beside the point.
Somebody had arranged for the tire to regulate pressure while Newman was racing.
The rulebook was already waiting for that idea.
Then Came the Bill
The original penalty was enormous. Newman lost 75 championship points, and Richard Childress lost 75 owner points.
Crew chief Luke Lambert was fined $125,000 and suspended for six races. Tire technician James Bender and engineer Philip Surgen also received six-race suspensions, and all three were placed on probation for the remainder of the year.
NASCAR classified the violation as P5, one step below the most severe level in its penalty system.
The message was fairly clear.
Creative tire ventilation was not going to be treated like forgetting a washer.
Newman dropped from sixth to twenty-sixth in the standings. A very small amount of escaping air had just moved him twenty championship positions without the car turning another lap.
Richard Childress Wasn’t Finished
Richard Childress Racing appealed.
The team had publicly opposed tire bleeding while the garage rumors were circulating, and RCR challenged both NASCAR’s case and the size of the penalty.
The appeals panel upheld the finding that the rules had been violated, but it reduced part of the punishment. Newman’s loss fell from 75 points to 50, Richard Childress received the same reduction in owner points, and Lambert’s fine dropped from $125,000 to $75,000.
The six-race suspensions remained.
Why the reduction?
Not because the panel decided the tires were innocent.
The problem was NASCAR’s definition of a post-race inspection. Part of the original punishment had been increased on that basis, and the appeals panel concluded the rulebook had not defined the term well enough to support it.
That is a fine piece of racing bureaucracy.
RCR did not overturn the violation.
It found a loophole in the penalty for getting caught using a loophole.
They Tried One More Time
RCR took the case to NASCAR’s final appeals officer. The hearing lasted more than nine hours.
When it was finished, the answer was still no.
The final appeals officer ruled that the evidence supported NASCAR’s finding. The reduced penalties stood, Lambert, Bender and Surgen served their suspensions, and Newman’s 50 missing points stayed missing.
So did Richard Childress’s.
The exact little pathway the air used to escape never became the most important part of the case.
NASCAR had proven enough.
A Lot of Trouble for a Little Air
That is what makes tire bleeding such a beautifully backward racing trick. For most of automotive history, everybody worried about keeping air inside the tire.
Race teams reached the point where keeping all of it became the problem.
A controlled leak could keep pressure from climbing, preserve a more useful contact patch and help the car deeper into a run. The holes, if that was how the No. 31 accomplished it, only needed to be tiny.
The advantage did not.
Neither did the penalty.
NASCAR collected the tires, the laboratory found enough to convince the officials and RCR appealed twice.
In the end, the air escaped more easily than the No. 31 team did.