On a historic day for NASCAR and Toyota, the spotlight was instead shed upon Goodyear. That spotlight was probably more like an interrogation lamp, as the Akron-based company did not have many fans.

The proof was in the speeds. Jeff Gordon’s pole winning run Friday night was over seven seconds slower than last year’s. Drivers were consistently running between 33 and 34 seconds only a few laps into a run. Kevin Harvick described it to his crew as “like dry slick dirt racing” at one point during the race. Tires seemed to fall off after only four or five laps into a run and then it was up to the drivers to hang on and make it to the end of a run without tearing up the car.

“For the first four or five laps, you could haul the mail,” race winner Kyle Busch explained, only to back up, “well maybe the first two anyway.”

The most outspoken critic of the weekend was the driver of the No. 20 Home Depot Toyota, Tony Stewart. Earlier in the weekend, the two-time champion commented, “After 10 years in the Cup Series, you learn to be highly disappointed with everything Goodyear does.”

After 500 miles, Stewart’s opinion was no different, simply harsher. “I’m really excited I didn’t crash; that was half the battle in itself. I have been racing for 28 years and have been a part of a number of professional series and have never seen a quality of racing tire like I saw this weekend. If Goodyear thinks that was their best effort today than I am really disappointed.”

Stewart’s comments were in depth and highly critical of the exclusive tire provider for all three of NASCAR’s series. “The got run out of Formula One, they got run out of CART, the IRL, run out of World of Outlaw sprint cars, run out of USAC because they couldn’t make a quality enough product. This weekend shows their true colors and what they are truly about.

“If the rest of the year, if this is what we have to look forward to is weekends like this, there will be a lot of drivers going into retirement a lot earlier because nobody’s going to want to keep doing this.”

Sitting beside Stewart was third place finisher Dale Earnhardt Jr. Much more soft spoken than Stewart, the sport’s most popular driver couldn’t help but agree. “There is a big difference between complaining and stating the obvious,” Dale Jr. pointed out. “It is what it is, it’s not a complaint, it is what it is.”

“We couldn’t run side by side, we’d wreck,” Junior said of the lack of excitement caused by the difficult tire. “We had to let each other go by.”

“The big thing,” Dale Jr. asked of Goodyear, “is please don’t do this at Darlington. That is the main thing… That might be able to top how horrible today was or how frustrating it was to run today if this is the case.”

“The reason we’re talking about it,” Stewart pointed out, “is because we don’t want to race on tires like we raced on today every week. This wasn’t fun today. There wasn’t anything fun about today’s race for anybody. I wouldn’t rerun this race for any amount of money in the world, it was just that bad.”

Although there were only four accidents today – three of them involving Elliott Sadler – Stewart urges not to take that as having a successful race.

“You couldn’t get close enough to each other. You never stayed around one person for very long because you just couldn’t,” Stewart said. “We know how bad our cars drove and we finished in the top five,” he continued talking about Earnhardt Jr. and himself. “Can you imagine the guys running in 20th, 25th place, how bad their cars drove? Well, we go to see it. The reason they weren’t crashing is they weren’t willing to run it any harder than that.”

Both Stewart and Earnhardt Jr. believe the problem stems from a fear of bad PR Dale Jr. explained, “Every time [Goodyear] have a tire failure, they think of it as their product is getting lambasted on national television, that it’s bad news for them when the consumer sees it.”

“Hopefully there was a good lesson learned,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “Goodyear doesn’t like to hear people bashing their tires, and I don’t like doing it, but I ain’t going to sit here and put up with this.”

Justin Fantozzi, marketing manager for Goodyear, offered no apology for their choice of tire this weekend. “We are tremendously proud of the wear rates we saw here,” Fantozzi explained. “We’ll do the same thing we do after every race. We have post race data now, so we will go back to Akron and sit down with engineers and see where that leaves us for the October race. Driver comments are part of the data set we use when selecting tires, so we will gather input there as well.”

Driver input concerning Goodyear’s selection of tire this weekend could likely fill a three-subject notebook, very little of it however would be positive. Teams have been frustrated since the start of the 2008 season with the tires provided by Goodyear and only four races in, it appears the exclusive tire provider has some serious re-evaluating to do.