Andretti team investigating Iowa tire failures

It was the right-front tire that failed on Kyle Kirkwood’s Andretti Global Honda on Saturday at Iowa Speedway, and while his No. 27 Honda made it to the finish line unscathed on Sunday, Kirkwood’s teammates weren’t as fortunate as similar right-front tire failures led to crashes for Marcus Ericsson and Colton Herta in Race 2.

“It was the right-front tire that gave out, just like what happened to the No. 27 yesterday,” Ericsson said of his No. 28 Honda. “It’s unfortunate. The problem is that you don’t really feel anything in the car  – you’re just driving like normal, and then it happens. So all you can do is brace and hope that the impact isn’t too bad.”

“It’s been a pretty terrible year so far, and that just kind of sums it up for us," Herta said. "We had a right-front tire failure. It’s not been fun this season to keep going out like this, but all we can do is go to the next one.”

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Andretti COO Rob Edwards and the teams’ engineers are investigating to see if there was a link – possibly in their suspension settings – to trigger the same problem in all three cars, but not altogether in Race 1 or Race 2.

“We're still looking at it,” he told RACER. “But clearly, all three cars had similar problems so there’s some commonality. What is ironic is, before the test that was done here two weeks ago, and all of the adjustments that were made after that test, we had had no issues. And I think what happened is with all of the various changes since the test, the camber, toe, pressures, the different right-front tire for this weekend clearly put us into a spot where we had issues and other people didn't.”

Ed Carpenter Racing’s Christian Rasmussen had a right-front tire failure at the test and a big crash, which led to a redesign and production of stronger right fronts for the doubleheader event. An overnight change was also processed by the field as the maximum recommended tire pressures were increased.

“The short answer is, we need to get to the bottom of it,” Edwards said of the expensive event for Andretti with three crashes in two days. “Gonna go and get ready for Toronto and hopefully we can bounce back.”