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While I am sure that @DaleJr and @pkligerman have good intentions, there is not an easy solution to racing in the rain on ovals. I understand the driver mindset of wanting to race whatever and whenever but physics puts a bit of a damper to that here. https://twitter.com/pkligerman/status/1312859632684142592
The idea has been floated in the past and even tested once at Martinsville.
"Labonte drove six laps in the wet at Martinsville. It was reported his top speed was around 70 mph. By comparison, the pole speed at the track in April was 93 mph."
https://www.racing-reference.info/showblog?id=3637
"Labonte drove six laps in the wet at Martinsville. It was reported his top speed was around 70 mph. By comparison, the pole speed at the track in April was 93 mph."
https://www.racing-reference.info/showblog?id=3637
Martinsville might be the only oval where I would even think that a test would be possible and even there, speeds would be much lower that what we would see would like just slightly faster than pace laps until someone hits a puddle and spins.
But even in that case, there would still need to be a considerable investment in building new rain tire compounds because as far as I am aware there is only one NASCAR rain tire compound and that was designed with road courses in mind.
This would likely require millions of dollars of research and development from Goodyear to build rain tire compounds that might be used at some point and only on certain tracks that could possibly handle it.
Just think of how many different compounds and constructions there are for slick tires for ovals now and imagine trying to replicate that for rain tires. More on that from a tire engineer that knows this stuff deeply here: https://twitter.com/SamanthaLT87/status/1231425015121313793?s=20
I recommend reading that whole mini thread form someone that is much smarter about this than I am just to see how many variables there are that are involved. https://twitter.com/SamanthaLT87/status/1231426467369750533?s=20
Even if there were somehow development that was approved to build so many different compounds and constructions and test them, you would still have to deal with the loads of these oval tracks which would result in stuff like tread block being torn off once they got heated up.
Ovals would also result in most of the water moving down to the bottom lane which would result in very unpredictable conditions depending on what tire someone was on at the time and pulling out of line could be disastrous.
So even if all of this time and money was invested to build rain tires for a handful of oval rain races per year, we would probably see cars running single file at close to pace lap speeds until someone pulls out of line and causes an incident.
But now you're saying "Sports cars race at Daytona in the rain" and that's absolutely true but it's on the road course and stock cars could do that as well because it's not just sustained loads on the oval. Also, even sports car races get red flagged if it's wet enough.
The general summary is that, it might be possible to develop some rain tires that might work on an oval or two but it would require a bunch of money and time for something that might result in terrible racing and might be used once or twice.
I just went over the basics and there is definitely a bunch more stuff to get into that would cause issues like water spray. https://twitter.com/creamedtomatoes/status/1313112807039213569
Anything is possible with enough research and development but that doesn't mean that it's necessary or will work well. It would be kind of like building specialty snow plows for use in Miami. Also, can't ever overthink anything that impacts driver safety. https://twitter.com/AJtheHenderson/status/1313108935403016193?s=20
