Goodyear Racing staying on track

AKRON — The Daytona 500 was last held 11 months ago. Given what has happened since, it feels like 11 years ago.

When Denny Hamlin crossed the finish line in first place at Daytona International Speedway on Feb. 17, 2020 — the rain-soaked race actually began a day earlier before getting postponed on lap 20 — no one in NASCAR had any idea what was to come.

"There was really no inkling that anything was going to change," Greg Stucker, director of racing for Goodyear, said.

"It's hard to remember exactly what the world was like back then. Everyone was starting to get the news (about COVID-19) and some sort of indication that other parts of the world were beginning to have trouble. and we were starting to see it here.

"But, certainly, over the course of Speedweeks in Daytona, there was no indication of what was to come for the rest of the season. It was kind of business as usual."

That all changed over the next month. NASCAR's Cup Series completed three more races and was poised for a fourth — the March 15 Folds of Honor QuikTrip 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway — when the pandemic wiped out the next two months of the season.

By the time racing resumed, it was a very different world with very different rules.

NASCAR was able to finish its season — albeit with fewer races and fans — and Goodyear's team adjusted like everyone else, adapting to a schedule that featured little or no practice or qualifying races.

Goodyear has been NASCAR's exclusive race tire supplier since 1997, producing more than 4,000 racing tires in its Akron plant during peak weeks of the NASCAR season. With the 2021 Daytona 500 set to kick off this year's Cup Series season on Feb. 14, here are four things to know about how Goodyear handled last year's curveballs, and how things look for 2021:

Goodyear's employees were already used to mobile workplaces.

"As everything went into lockdown, obviously we all started working from home, and Goodyear has tremendous resources enabling us to do that," Mr. Stucker said, "but we kind of do that all the time when we're on the road.

"We've got a mobile office, so we work remotely all the time. So for everyone in the racing division, there really wasn't much of a change. You were just doing it constantly instead of on the weekends when you're at the racetrack. So that was kind of an easy transition."

Being part of a global company gave the racing team a head start.

Goodyear's overseas employees already had seen the effects of the pandemic and could stress its danger, as well as the importance of things such as masks, sanitizer and social distancing.

"We've got a whole team at Goodyear that focuses on business continuity, and we tapped into them right away to make sure we were following all the protocols that we (as a company) had already learned globally," Mr. Stucker said. "They were obviously helping the manufacturing guys get set so when the plant was going to come back up to produce product, they were doing it the right way.

"So we had a tremendous resource to tap into to make sure we were doing things the right way when we started traveling again, going to the racetrack and making sure all the protocols we had learned about also dovetailed what everyone at NASCAR and NHRA and everyone else had decided."

Goodyear will use the same tire package in 2021 as it did in 2020.

"I think that's a good thing," Mr. Stucker said. "That gives everyone — from NASCAR to ourselves to the teams — a very thorough playbook to refer to as they get ready to run this year's race."

NASCAR originally had targeted 2021 for the debut of its "NextGen" race car platform — complete with 18-inch wheels and tires — but that project was postponed to 2022.

Goodyear also generates a considerable amount of tire data in its labs to "make sure we're providing the teams as much tire performance data as we can," Mr. Stucker said.

"That helps them get prepared for when there's no practice or limited practice prior to the race," he said. "I think that's a real testament to last year on how prepared the teams were when they showed for those first races when there wasn't any practice. I think the on-track product was tremendous and that's a testament to the preparedness of the team and the information they had and part of that was the information we provided and all the simulation work to get ready for the race."

Goodyear expects 2021 to look a lot like 2020, at least for now.

"We know that in a lot of places, the pandemic is as bad as it was last year and in some cases even worse," he said. "We have to continue to keep doing the things we've been doing and have done very successfully. We didn't have a lot of instances of issues over the course of the (2020) season. You just have to continue to be cautious and careful and do all the right things."