Denny Hamlin reveals the staggering amount of money NASCAR teams waste on tires

It costs a lot of money to fund a NASCAR Cup Series team, but Denny Hamlin shared a shocking stat on his podcast that revealed how much cash some teams are wasting in unused Goodyear tires over the course of a season.

Each weekend when teams arrive at the track, a Goodyear truck will be stocked with hundreds of sets of tires. Each race has a maximum allotment of tires that can be used, and teams will always buy as many as they can get to give themselves strategic flexibility during a race – but not all of those sets of tires are used on a Sunday. Goodyear does not allow teams to turn unused tires back in for a refund, however.

“Say we go to Texas this weekend and they give us eight sets of tires. If we use six, we don’t get a rebate on those two [left over]. We do not get reimbursed for those tires…. If we have a leftover set, $2,400 a piece or whatever they might be, we can’t just turn them back into Goodyear and get a refund. They tell us ‘you’re buying these sets of tires and they’re yours now, you can do whatever you want with them.”

The problem for NASCAR teams is that on most NASCAR tracks, there are usually enough long green flag runs – and not enough tire degradation – to get through a race without using every set purchased. Which means most weekends, teams are bringing unused tires back home.

For a four-car team like Joe Gibbs Racing, which Hamlin is a part of, those costs quickly add up. Hamlin said that in 2022, the first year that NASCAR used the current next-gen car, JGR’s inventory of unused tires at the end of the season was worth nearly seven figures.

“Nearly $1 million dollars worth of tires that [Joe Gibbs Racing], the team spent on tires that it never ran.”

So why can’t NASCAR teams just re-use the tires next week?

It’s complicated. Hamlin explained that the tires his teams saved in Texas could potentially be used again when the Cup Series visits Kansas – a similar 1.5-mile track, on May 5th, but given the competitive advantage to having the freshest tires possible from Goodyear, it’s unlikely they would be used.

“They’ll put [the unused tires] in inventory…. Let’s say we go to Kansas next weekend, we likely would tap into that extra set and say ‘OK, we’re going to practice on those tires.’ But if Kansas is three, four months down the road we’re not going to want old date codes. We’re not going to want older tires because they age. Rubber ages and it changes compounds. It’s funny when you get older tires, that can really mess up a car. So it just goes to waste.”