Top Fuel racer Antron Brown was supposed to be tire-testing for Goodyear at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway following the NHRA Summit Nationals.
 
"We were supposed to test some new tires for them. But I couldn't," Brown said Monday in a telephone interview from his home in Pittsboro, Ind., "because we tore our race car up and we had to come back to the shop and get our car together."
 
He said he has no idea exactly what caused the right rear tire of his Aaron's/ Matco Tools Dragster to peel off April 1 during the final round of the SummitRacing.com Nationals at Las Vegas. It left him with a slight injury added to the insult of losing the Winternationals rematch with Don Schumacher Racing associate Spencer Massey.
 
But Brown knows he came away with a bruised left foot and faith in God, Goodyear, and the safety improvements to the Top Fuel cockpits.
 
"I don't know what caused the tire to do that," he said.
 
He said "it's hard to say" if this tire incident was an isolated one, "because they're analyzing the tire. Goodyear has the tire. And we have no results of what happened or what caused it.

Watch the final round where Antron's tire suffers damage. Top Fuel racer Antron Brown was supposed to be tire-testing for Goodyear at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway following the NHRA Summit Nationals.
 
"We were supposed to test some new tires for them. But I couldn't," Brown said Monday in a telephone interview from his home in Pittsboro, Ind., "because we tore our race car up and we had to come back to the shop and get our car together."
 
He said he has no idea exactly what caused the right rear tire of his Aaron's/ Matco Tools Dragster to peel off April 1 during the final round of the SummitRacing.com Nationals at Las Vegas. It left him with a slight injury added to the insult of losing the Winternationals rematch with Don Schumacher Racing associate Spencer Massey.
 
But Brown knows he came away with a bruised left foot and faith in God, Goodyear, and the safety improvements to the Top Fuel cockpits.
 
"I don't know what caused the tire to do that," he said.
 
He said "it's hard to say" if this tire incident was an isolated one, "because they're analyzing the tire. Goodyear has the tire. And we have no results of what happened or what caused it.
 
"We looked at the tire at the end of the racetrack and you see that tire tread on top just got peeled away, like the tire stuck on the racetrack and the rubber got peeled away. Other than that, I have no idea what caused it, what happened, why it did it," Brown said. "We don't know. Until they can give us an answer, we haven't got answers back on any of that stuff yet."
 
In the meantime, crew chiefs Brian Corradi and Mark Oswald and the DSR shop specialists have built a new dragster for him to debut at this weekend's Four-Wide Nationals at zMAX Dragway at Charlotte.
 
But his recollection of what he called a "violent" ride ultimately reassured him that the cars are becoming, at least incrementally, safer.
 
"It all happened so fast," Brown said of that final-round pass. "Right before the traps, it just shook really, really bad. It was like bad, severe tire shake, like we [in Top Fuel] experience at the start of our runs if the car's too slow on a real tight track. It just rattled really, really bad.
 
"Honestly, when I got out at the far end of the track, and I looked at the car and we got the car back to the pit and examined all the stuff that broke on the race car, I just couldn't believe all the stuff that got tore up. It was violent in the car, but you don't think it would do that much damage to a car."
 
Although the untrained eye couldn't detect Brown was on such a dangerous ride, Brown said he certainly knew it. "Oh yeah . . . oh yeah . . . oh yeah," he said, no doubt in his voice. "You could feel it. It shook the car so hard that it broke all the diagonals that we use to support the chassis, all the crossbars."
 
He explained the extent of the damage to the chassis and body.
 
"If you look at a Top Fuel car, if you ever saw it all apart . . . If you're looking out the top part of the race car, you look on the top, it has a bar that goes across the top . . . Like, each one of those bays are windows," Brown said. "Each of them has a diagonal that goes from one side of the square to the other side of the square to make the square into triangles, to support the car. It goes from one box and once it gets to that point, in the next box, it has another one that goes in the opposite direction. So it goes the opposite direction in each bay, down to the front till you get to the fuel tank. And they have heim joints to hold them in there. It broke every single one of those off the race car.
 
"The front end of the car, when it vibrated so bad, it [swapped] the front around. You can't even see the side panel, like, the mag panel on the side of the car that will say, 'Aaron's.' A little bit in front of 'Aaron's,' where we have some of our associate sponsorship stuff, you can see where that panel dimpled in, like it dimpled in, like the whole front of the car went sideways and came back," he said. "It rattled so bad it shook the front end around like that. It had to rattle that bad to break those uprights.
 
Headed into Charlotte, there is no definitive answer as to what happened to Antron Brown's tire in Las Vegas. (Jon Asher photo)"That's what keeps the front of the car straight. You have all those torsion bars in there that hold it from [moving] from side to side. They'll let the car go up and down, but the diagonals won't let the front end sway left or right. That's how we're able to drive them," he said.
 
Brown said he realized then how far the sport has come, in terms of safety.
 
"The damage was shocking, but inside the cockpit, I think all the credit is due to all the safety stuff we have in our cockpit now," he said.
 
In our cockpit, the pads that we use -- we use these Bald Spot pads that they actually make for IndyCar -- in my car, the foam's a lot denser and a lot thicker. It has Memory Foam on the outside layer, too, where my helmet can't get a run at it. So my head still went through the jarring, but my head didn't move that much. It kept it more secure."
 
Travis Cobb, co-owner of Bald Spot Sports, said what did the trick for Brown is special padding that's "a layered sequence of materials," including EPP (expanded polypropylene),  fashioned into a proprietary substance private-labeled and trademarked as "Creasorb."
 
Said Cobb, "It absorbs a lot of energy before it gets to the driver. It's extremely lightweight, and it's omni-directional." That means no matter which way a driver's head might be tossed or shaken or turned, the Creasorb will continue working and protecting.
 
Bald Spot Sports' protective seat materials are found in passenger cars from just about every manufacturer known to the American motorist, and they're protecting the 200-mph-plus IndyCar drivers. The Brownsburg, Ind.-based company also serves such drag-racing headliners as Tony Schumacher, Spencer Massey, Steve Torrence, Shawn Langdon Khalid alBalooshi, Bob Vandergriff, Brandon Bernstein, Matt Hagan, Ron Capps, and Cruz Pedregon.
 
Brown also credited the dragster's restraint system for sparing him serious harm at Las Vegas.
 
"The way we fasten ourselves in the car -- how tight that my boys tie me in -- I think that's what really helped me out the most," he said. "The only problem that I got was on my left foot. From that shaking, it actually shook back and forth hard enough -- right where your pinkie toe is, that little bone on the side there . . .  Our race boots are soft right there . . . It actually bruised me up. I've got a really bad lump on my foot right there. It still hurts. I don't know if I fractured it or what. I can still walk on it and everything. I don’t feel no moving bones. I think I bruised it really bad."
 
He said he drives with his left foot "in the center of the race car. Once you let off the clutch, you put your left foot in the center, on the dead pedal right in the middle, so you get your foot away from the clutch in a Top Fuel car . . . Well, my left foot doesn't have anything to hold it. My right foot is in a stirrup in the throttle pedal. So it can't go nowhere." So it was exposed more, susceptible to whatever happens when the car is shaking that vigorously.
 
As for the tire itself -- the version of this racing slick -- Brown said, "Goodyear, I have all the trust in them, because we work with them. A lot of the top-tier race teams, like Force, Al-Anabi, ourselves . . . DSR, we all work with Goodyear close. And we test a lot of tires, like new tires they're working on, making better, and different compounds to make better so things like that don't happen. So we've been testing."
 
Massey and the FRAM team, along with the Al-Anabi / Toyota duo of Langdon and alBalooshi and others, did test that Monday after the Las Vegas race.
 
"So that right there is why you've always got to be evolving what they're building right now," Brown said, referring to his incident.
 
"They're evolving their new tires. So the next series that comes out, hopefully it won't  be an issue," he said. "We're a lot better than where we used to be at with this version of the tire from the version before it. So the next version will hopefully be the same stride -- hopefully we'll be that much better.
 
"Before, we had plain blowouts," Brown said. "Cory had in Charlotte -- like, Charlotte can get like that, where it's real cold -- at the 4-Wide[race] Cory blew the tire out in the FRAM car two years ago. So we're a version above that. We still see a little peel and chunks, but we haven't had any tires blow out. Hopefully it keep on evolving and we all get better from it."
 
Brown couldn't help but analyze track conditions and traditional weather and atmospheric trends for The Strip at Las Vegas that no one can control.        
 
"The bad part is that Vegas is one of those types of track that the air is dry and when the track gets cool there, the track gets really, really tight there. And it's been known before you chunk tires at Vegas," he said. "Everybody knows that.
 
"When you race on Vegas and the temperature goes down -- it got really cold on Sunday -- If you notice, we didn't have any problems on Friday and Saturday, when the temperatures were hot. Nobody did. But on Sunday a lot of cars were tearing just some of the tires apart, doing what you normally do on a cold track, when the rubber starts pulling away from the tire," Brown said.
 
"The track is so firm it starts pulling the tires apart. That's what it does. That's the norm," he said. "What happened on Vegas is it got cold. Where it happened at was in the final round. When the sun went down, the shade got on the racetrack. And the racetrack cooled down by the time we ran the finals. The racetrack went from being a 100-degree racetrack to probably down to being a low-80-degree racetrack or a mid-80-degree racetrack."
 
An 80-degree racetrack, considered through the filter of 80-degree ambient temperature, sounds relatively warm. But that's deceptive Brown indicated that an 80-degree racing surface borders on the risky.
 
"Brother, when you're at a dry racetrack it is. An 80-degree racetrack is a cold racetrack for us. That's the racetracks you get when you get out there and it's like 65 degrees outside.
 
"The rubber's firm. The rubber's hard. Then when you're on a track that has humidity and moisture on it, the moisture stays out there and keeps it a little bit of heat in the rubber. When you're on a dry track like Vegas, it takes all that moisture out and makes everything tight and firm and dry. The track's the same way: ash-y, dry, and tight," he said.
 
"That's why you see in Vegas, when it gets hot outside . . . Let's say the track's 100 degree temp, well, in 100-degrees track temp we're out there running low (3.)80s on the track.  You go to another track where it's 100-degrees, 110-degree temp we're barely running .80s. We're only in the high .80s or .90 flat or .88, like it's somewhere in Georgia or something. The humidity's high. But in Vegas, you could be at the same track temp but you an run .82s and .81s and .83s. So that' the difference in racetracks that you deal with."
 
Brown has weathered worse in his five-year Top Fuel career. No matter what, he has a strong faith, he said.
 
"Thing about it is at the end of the day, I always keep all my faith in God, for sure," Brown said. "Everything happens for a reason, so that was an eye-opener there. We came back. We built a new car. So now it's time for us to keep eyes on different stuff."
 
He'll have plenty, including two extra opponents with each run, to keep an eye on in Charlotte. And he'll have his ears open for news of what caused his tire to peel at Las Vegas.