All right, everybody, welcome back to another edition of the Untitled Jeff Fluck podcast.

I'm your host, Jeff Fluck, and today it is another How I Got Here version of this podcast.

This time it's with David Gross Close, who is the director of tire systems and unified testing for NASCAR.

Now, David is someone who didn't come up spending his whole career in NASCAR.

He grew up as a big race fan going to the races.

And as you'll hear, he only fell into NASCAR later.

So I actually have a lot of cool photos on the website that goes with this story on jeff gluck.com. So if you want to

see some photos of David with some old drivers and things like that, stuff that would go along

with the story, feel free to check out the website as well after you listen or maybe as you're

listening. It may help illustrate a little bit of

what's going on here for you but anyway let's dive right into it and hear how david groseclose

got to where he is today all right everybody i'm here with nascar's david gross close and

uh david can you tell me what what you do now for NASCAR and what your position entails?

Sure. My title is the director of tire systems and unified testing. So I have a lot to do with

the tires with with Goodyear. I'm kind of liaison between Goodyear and NASCAR. I go to all

the tire tests. I'm the NASCAR representative there,

along with Jerry Caproth, who handles all the logistics for the testing. Also, at the testing,

we do friction testing with our new friction testing machine we just purchased last year.

We also do track surface scanning, so that's kind of part of my job that's not really in my title,

but we're kind of gradually going towards that kind of thing, getting more scientific with the data we collect and with instead of you know we got more more uh qualitative stuff and

and it's it's it's really really good for for good year because they're getting all this data and

uh they can help they can help them make the tires better every weekend so so pretty much anything that has to do with tires and the track surface,

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