Over this race weekend at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, 18 drivers broke the old track record of 29.212 seconds at 184.856mph which Kasey Kahne set back in 2007.

Vegas native Kurt Busch’s pole setting qualifying run at 188.719 mph for a 28.614 seconds lap was nearly 4 mph faster than the old record.

Why?

"Tires,” Jeff Gordon said on Friday. “There's a new tire Goodyear brought. I don't know all the differences. But it's definitely the tires. The teams do a great job. We bring a little bit more power this year over the off-season and make a little bit more power. We find ways to make the cars a little bit faster, but the majority of what happened today was tires."

Ryan Newman elaborated a little more, giving less credit to the tires and more to Mother Nature.

"Well, they've got new tires and we've worked on our race cars and the track was cool,” he said. “I thought it was pretty good that for whatever reason Mother Nature keeps following us in the form of rain and it seems like it's been it's been cool for qualifying for almost every time, including Daytona; but the conditions have stayed the same throughout the entire practice session. It cooled off a little bit, don't get me wrong, but if it had been sunny it would have been a bigger difference depending on where you drew."

The combination of each of these elements allowed the Sprint Cup drivers to shatter the old record and the new higher speeds are sure to make today’s Shelby American even more exciting than usual.

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