Roval Tire Twist Turned Strategy into the Star of the Round of 12 Finale
The game plan for Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series playoff race at the Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval? It was pretty much thrown out the window after Saturday’s practice. A new Goodyear tire showed up and decided to shake things up, turning what everyone thought they knew on its head. This wasn’t just a minor tweak.
Lap times plummeted by two to three seconds compared to the 2024 race. But the real gut punch came during the long runs. Teams watched in disbelief as their lap times fell off a cliff. A staggering four-second drop over the life of a tire. That kind of dramatic slowdown sent crew chiefs scrambling, forcing them to completely rethink their race-day strategy.
The Tire Strategy Curveball No One Saw Coming
Here’s the kicker: The tire strategy used during the Bank of America Roval 400 was nothing new. Teams had run this exact compound at the other five road courses on the 2025 calendar. That familiarity is precisely what made the extreme wear at the Roval such a shock to the system. No one was prepared for it to behave this way here.
“Yeah, it was a bit of a shock,” admitted race winner Shane van Gisbergen, even after celebrating in Victory Lane. “I think our outright pace was two seconds slower than last year, and then you would fall off another four seconds… That was a big surprise. I don’t think anyone expected that.”
Van Gisbergen, a driver who lives to push the car to its absolute limit, had to wrestle with a different kind of challenge. “As a driver, you want to be flat-out the whole time and pushing hard, but also, those races create mixed strategies and different pit cycles and stuff,” he reflected.
“Probably more interesting as a fan and seeing people come and go, and a lot more passing. I’m all for whatever makes better racing. It’s frustrating having to drive and save the tire the whole time, but if it makes good racing, I’m all for that.”
The sentiment was the same up and down pit road. Adam Stevens, the seasoned crew chief for Christopher Bell’s No. 20 Toyota, was just as surprised, despite a solid third-place finish. “I think it caught, certainly us off guard,” Stevens told NASCAR.com. “I don’t know if I could say it’s true for everyone, but yeah, it was a different race for sure.”
A High-Stakes Game of Strategy and Adaptation
With the final race of the Round of 12 on the line, teams were desperate to make adjustments. But NASCAR’s rules are tight. Much like the tire catastrophe at Bristol earlier in the season, the cars are largely impounded after inspection. Stevens lamented the lack of flexibility.”Most of the setup decisions are made before you leave for the track,” he explained
 “And the car’s impounded after inspection, and the list of things you can change is pretty small. So if you feel like you’re way off, there’s just not a lot you can do to remedy it.”He was blunt about what they would have done with more freedom.
“If we had access to every setup parameter, we would have changed an abundance of things that we couldn’t change… if we were running this race again tomorrow, we’d come back with something pretty different.” But racing is about dealing with the hand you’re dealt. “It’s the same for all of us,” Stevens conceded. “We just had to make the most of it.”
When the Playoff Strategy Crumbles
For some, the tire gamble was a nail in their playoff coffin. Billy Scott, crew chief for Tyler Reddick’s No. 45 Toyota, came into the weekend needing a win. Starting on pole gave them a shot, but the strategy unraveled. While others pitted mid-stage, Scott kept Reddick out to save a precious set of tires for the end.
It was a roll of the dice that didn’t pay off.”The strategy going in was focusing on winning, so we weren’t too worried about getting stage points,” Scott admitted. “In hindsight, though, I think we probably would have fared better to have followed the group in that stage.”Their aggressive setup, aimed at finding that extra ounce of speed, backfired spectacularly with the high-wear tires.
“I think it backfired, in a sense, with having tires that wouldn’t last 10 to 12 laps. We were certainly on the short side of that.” Reddick’s playoff run was over, along with those of his teammate Bubba Wallace, Ross Chastain, and Austin Cindric. It was a brutal end to their championship hopes.
The End Game
Ultimately, while pit road was a chess match of two-stop versus three-stop strategies, one man seemed to be playing a different game. Shane “SVG” van Gisbergen’s raw speed was undeniable. He cut through the tire drama and strategy chaos, storming to his fifth straight road-course victory.
As Adam Stevens put it, “We could run second or third, and that was about it. We just didn’t have anything for the 88, and we knew coming in, he was going to be the car to beat.” Even a perfect day might not have been enough. On a day when the tires demanded a flawless strategy, SVG proved that sometimes, pure talent is the ultimate trump card.
