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Motorsport

Matt Weaver

First impressions of naval base street course from NASCAR Cup stars

NASCAR Denny Hamlin Carson Hocevar Ryan Blaney Cup Series Daniel Suarez Van Gisbergen

For all the messy chaos the Craftsman Truck Series brought on Friday at Naval Air Station North Beach, the Cup Series practice session was pretty procedural.

The only incidents of note:

A Jimmie Johnson 360-degree spin
Austin Cindric spinning
Kevin Magnussen flat-side hitting the Turn 16 wall
Brad Keselowski slamming on brakes to avoid drilling Turn 2

But again, that was it. It’s a cliché but the best in the discipline proved their mettle, at least when driving the 3.4-mile street circuit largely by themselves over the course of a 50-minute session.

The biggest story was just how much tire degradation there was.

“Yeah, lots of it,” said Denny Hamlin afterwards. “I ran eight laps into the first run and that was all the tires wanted at that point.”

That was the experience for Daniel Suarez as well.

“I only run like six or seven laps and my rear tires were completely gone,” said Suarez. “So that’s going to be fun to see.”

Ditto Ryan Blaney.

“Tire fall off is massive,” he said. “I feel like you get one and a half good laps on tires and then you're struggling. So that's going to be interesting trying to go 20 in a stage on a set if you do get 20.

“So, I think it's going to be a lot of tire management, things like that.”

Does Hamlin expect tire failures during a long green flag run?

“I don't think so,” Hamlin said. “I think that you're going to know that you've got no tires left and you have to come in and pit. So, I don't think they're going to blow from being out of air. I think that you'll just be out of control and have no choice but to pit.”

Marble matters

The other significant takeaway from Friday is that the tires marbled all the way around the most abrasive parts of a circuit that arguably is comprised of at least five different aggregates.

Carson Hocevar said the rubber creates a line cheat sheet of sorts.

“Man, I've had fun,” Hocevar said. “I enjoyed the track. It's sketchy for sure. The most interesting part … because obviously the tires wear out so much. It looks very Formula 1-esque with the rubber.

“The groove was super narrow already, so all the marbles and stuff was right outside … and so you could almost have a cheat sheet of the groove,” Hocevar said. “You could just see on the edge of where everybody's running with the marbles and stuff.

“But it makes me a little nervous how it's going to be because I haven't really had a lot of experience with that amount of marbles. If we can pass and not just instantly then slide the next corner with the marbles on it.

“But I've had fun. I enjoyed the track. It's a lot more flowing than you would've expect it to be for the way it looks.”

The concern, as Hocevar articulated it, is that if the tires marble up on Sunday, the way they did on Friday, it makes the track even more narrow. Because driving over the marbles will take away all the grip in the tires on the next corner.

Hamlin called it a ‘tough’ predicament.

“I mean the track was very narrow on the backside today with the marbles,” Hamlin said. “Typically when the race starts, the track naturally widens-out a little bit because of the restarts and the cars.

“Not everyone's going to be single-file out by that portion of the track, so naturally I think it's going to get blown out a little bit wider. But you don't want to be off by much.”

Blaney said he had several attempted passes on cars undermined by the marbles during practice.

“We marbled up a lot today, especially on the concrete pad areas from Turn 10 all the way to 16, got marbles, dusty, stuff like that,” Blaney said. “I got off line trying to pass somebody and crashed kind of like you see in IndyCar races when tracks get marbled up on street courses.

“I felt like it was pretty similar there. So yeah, I don't know how the race is going to be.”

SVG vs The World

Shane Van Gisbergen won two of the three Cup Series races on the Streets of Chicago so why wouldn’t he be the favorite on Sunday?

The three-time Supercars champion turned seven-time Cup Series race winner was eighth fastest overall in practice on Friday, but more importantly, was almost a full second faster than anyone else over a five lap average.

Hamlin thinks the Kiwi is the favorite.

“I mean I think there's probably a couple of those sections and you guys might figure it out where that is, but there's about two or three sections where I think he makes up the bulk of his time,” Hamlin said. “But I think, really, his expertise is the longevity of keeping his tires on his car for an extended period of time with the tire allotment that we have.

“We're going to be forced to go pretty long on tires and I think that's where he's going to separate himself from the field.”

For his part, SVG resents the widespread expectation that he’s the obvious winner.

“It pisses me off a bit, like I feel like it disrespects my competition,” Van Gisbergen said. “I hold my competition to a really high level. So yeah, I feel like I've spent the last little while talking myself down because I know that there's 10 guys probably that can win on pure pace. In NASCAR, so much stuff can happen with strategies and stages, that there's even more guys who can win. So I don't think it's going to be easy, that's for sure.”