Tire wear takes center stage at the inaugural Coronado street race
It sounds like a fever dream: setting up a NASCAR Cup Series machine to race on an active military base. But the inaugural event at Naval Base Coronado is reality, and it has the paddock scrambling. The surface here is an unpredictable beast, featuring four distinct types of asphalt and concrete that are shredding tires at an alarming rate. It’s an extreme departure from the Chicago street course we’ve come to know, and it has crew chiefs like Stephan Doran, who runs the No. 97 Trackhouse Racing Chevrolet for Shane van Gisbergen, reevaluating everything.
Friday’s practice session was a wake-up call. The tire wear is so severe that it’s being compared to the Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval, but with the added complication of a massive 3.4-mile lap. The desperation was real enough that NASCAR opted to grant teams an extra set of tires, bringing the total to 10 dry-weather sets for the 75-lap race. As Travis Peterson, crew chief for the No. 71 Spire Motorsports Chevrolet driver Michael McDowell, noted, no one even managed a 10-lap run in practice to truly understand the tire life. It’s going to be a fascinating, high-stakes guessing game.
Strategy is effectively being rewritten on the fly. The classic move of flipping stages for track position might just be dead, as cars simply won't have the rubber to survive the extra laps. We’re also looking at a circuit that is genuinely gnarly; between the cresting hills that send cars leaping and the violent dips, these machines are going to be worked over. As Doran put it, dealing with cars bottoming out or catching air is, frankly, just a bit crazy.
