RUBBER MATCH; JIMMIE JOHNSON WINS SECOND BRICKYARD; TIRE WOES MAR RACE.

Byline: AL PEARCE

NASCAR, Goodyear and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway probably did the best they couldas they said repeatedly all weekendunder difficult circumstances surrounding the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard. But the problem of tires that would not hold up for more than a few laps at speed should have been addressed several months ago.

The sanctioning body should have overruled its crew chiefs and insisted on a full-scale tire test before the 400. Instead, only three teams were invited to test their Car of Tomorrow with the tire Goodyear planned to bring to the race. If, say, two dozen teams had run a full test, Goodyear almost certainly would have realized its tire was not going to work. And NASCAR would have saved itself the embarrassment of staging a 160-lap raceone of its two or three largest events every yearas a series of 10-lap sprint races. Those green-flag runs were interrupted by scheduled "competition cautions'' so teams could change tires before they failed catastrophically.

"It's amazing that we tested at Pocono, but didn't test the Car of Tomorrow here,'' said Toyota driver J. J. Yeley, one of a handful of Allstate 400 starters with experience in the Indianapolis 500. "That's just silly. You couldn't really race out there. It became a matter of just surviving. You could go for six or seven laps, but that was it.''

Excessive tire wear and "cording'' showed up early in two practice sessions Friday. Robin Pemberton, NASCAR's vice president for competition, along with Goodyear's Greg Stucker, monitored the situation carefully. They hoped the track would "rubber in'' and thus reduce wear. When it didn't, when the cars turned the needed rubber to flying dust, they decided to bring in the 800 tires built and earmarked for the next race, the Pocono 500.

They vowed to run the original tires as long as possible, but have the Pocono tires available if teams ran out and had nothing for the final miles. It didn't quite come to that, but several teams were down to their last sets when the race mercifully ended with Jimmie Johnson (Chevrolet) winning over Carl Edwards (Ford), Denny Hamlin (Toyota), Elliott Sadler (Dodge) and Jeff Gordon (Chevrolet). Johnson jumped from third to first, thanks to good work by his pit crew during the day's final round of pit stops with 10 laps remaining.

"I was concerned about [tire wear] every lap, every corner,'' Johnson said after leading eight times for 71 laps, including the final 10. "You could almost feel the tire life being taken out if you leaned too hard. Nobody wanted us to be in this position, but it's the position we were in and I commend NASCAR for handling it like they did. I'm sure it was long and boring, but they called a great race. They kept us from tearing up race cars for no reason. As an entire sport, we did everything we could. We've learned a lot. We'll take our lumps, I'm sure, and come back next year and put on a better show.''