Burton: Tyre war not the solution

Burton believes that having a second company beside Goodyear is not the way to avoid a repetition of last week's tyre issues at Indianapolis, where some fingers pointed at the series' official supplier for taking the wrong selection to the first race with the new Cup car at the venue.

"I think the negatives of multiple tyres far outweigh the positives," Burton said at Pocono Raceway.

"I believe that for racing to be as good as it can be, every team should have access to the same tyre and I don't think having different tyres in any form makes the racing better. If the race turns into a battle of tyres, how does that make better racing? I don't think it does.

"After Indy last week, you could make the case. If another tyre manufacturer was there, maybe they would have had something that wouldn't have that trouble, but the problem with that would have been that half the field would have had those problems and the other half wouldn't."

Burton has already experienced a tyre war at Cup level when he was one of a handful of drivers competing with Hoosier tyres in 1994, while the majority of the field raced on Goodyear's.

He says under such a scenario there was an immediate increase of tyre failures as manufacturers pushed their products to the limit. He also reminds that the racing was very uneven at times, given the difference in performance between the two brands.

"My recollection is that tyre failure rates went up," he said. "We had more catastrophic tyre failures and people had contracts with one manufacturer or the other.

"Hoosier lapped the field at North Wilkesboro. I almost won Atlanta in my fourth race as a cup driver because the tyres were so much better."

The RCR driver also echoed Dale Earnhardt Jr's remarks, referring to the track surface at Indy as a contributing factor to the tyre issues..

"Every year we go to Indy with the way the surface is,"Burton said. "I also heard Indy stand up and say they had no blame in it whatsoever, that's not true. Indy does have blame.

"It's the only race track that we go to all year long that you can only run four, five or six laps of practice before the tyres are completely worn out. That means that the surface is a factor."