If you somehow managed to stay awake through the entire broadcast of yesterday's Kobalt Tools 500, you no doubt caught Tony Stewart's scathing criticism of Goodyear after he hopped out of his Toyota Camry. If you watched Speed's coverage this weekend, you know he was simply echoing criticisms that he had for the tire company ever since the teams arrived in Atlanta on Friday.

Such criticism is well deserved from the standpoint that the teams in the pre-season tested at Atlanta one compound and gathered significant amounts of data from those sessions...only to find out that Goodyear brought a tire with a harder compound to the actual race.

Speed's Jimmy Spencer took up for Goodyear on Nascar Raceday by suggesting that these issues would actually make for better racing. After Smoke repeated his criticisms after the race, Larry McReynolds pointed out that last week at Vegas, there were numerous problems with tires blowing out. During the race, there wasn't a single issue with tire's blowing out.

Now both Spencer and Larry Mac have forgotten more about Nascar and racing than I'll never know. But I think they're both insulting my racing intelligence.

First, the race proved Spencer's prediction wrong. The tire issues didn't create more racing. On the flip side, it prevented it.

Everyone was afraid to go side-by-side racing into the corners for fear they'd take either themselves out or the other driver they were racing.

And of course there weren't any blowouts, Larry. It's much harder to blow a tire out with a harder compound than it is to blow out a tire with a softer compound.

Obviously, there's a happy medium that Goodyear is trying to shoot for. I'm certainly not an engineer, so I don't know how fine a medium that is. What I do know is it's ridiculous for Goodyear to give the teams one compound to test with, then render the data from those test sessions irrelevant by bringing a tire with a much harder compound.

And Tony Stewart is completely within his right to openly complain about these actions.