Hoosier Racing Tire this week unveiled a revised version of its National Late Model Tour right-rear tire, and Thursday’s MARS Championship Series event at Cedar County Raceway in Tipton, Iowa, marked the first time the tire was in competition — no doubt a factor in the program drawing a solid 43-car field.

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Most organizations are allowing the new tire, which has a taller, softer sidewall and dimpled tread pattern, along with the existing tire, an LM-style tire with a shorter, more rigid carcass and traditional block-style tread (the hardness of the compounds remain the same for NLMT 2s, 3s and 4s).

Friday's $5,000 winner at the quarter-mile oval, Brandon Sheppard of New Berlin, Ill., says he’s fully committed to the future.

“I told my guys this week, they said, ‘What do you wanna do?’ I said, ‘Well, dismount every single one of the old ones and leave them at the shop. We’re gonna run the new ones — because that’s the new tire.’ That’s what we’re going to have to be on eventually anyway,” Sheppard said.

Whether that made a difference or not we’ll never know, but the 32-year-old Sheppard led all but two laps of Thursday’s 40-lap feature, outrunning fellow Illinois driver Bobby Pierce (who used the new right-rear tire) and Tanner English of Benton, Ky. (he stuck with the older version in the feature), who finished third but briefly took second from Pierce.

English did run the newer tire through his heat, but reverted to the original right-rear because his one and only newer right-rear blistered in the heat race. He could have bolted on another newer right-rear, but reasons the blistering is from not grooving the newer right-rear properly.

“We picked it up at the racetrack, and we only had one grooved up,” English said. “We were going to study it and see what we needed to do before we grooved up the next one. We blistered it, and I really wanted to go run a (newer) 4 (right-rear). I guess since they're so new, the new 4 isn't much harder than the old 3. ... I just felt like we needed to do more studying before we try to run a whole feature with it.

“I think (the tire blistering is) just something we can fix on our own, the way we groove them. I don’t think it’s all on the tire,” said English, who added he “wasn’t necessarily” at a disadvantage on the older tire, “but I don’t think I had an advantage, either,” he added.

Sheppard, who was able to make practice laps with the new tire a night earlier, considered the new tire worthy and said it caused him no problems, maintaining the balance he’s been accustomed to in his car.

“Right front, right rear, left rear were all wore about the same,” Sheppard said. “I mean, my car is good and balanced, and that helps, but you know you can easily destroy a right-rear tire on a deal like this if you’re too hard on it or whatever. So I think overall it was good.”

The jury is still out, but Sheppard says he’ll learn more in the coming weeks on the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series and in other events.

“We’re soon to find out because we're getting ready to go to a lot of different racetracks across the country, and I know there’s gonna be some guys that run old tires,” Sheppard said. “I’m sure there was a few guys that ran the old tires tonight. … a lot of people (question) everything that goes on in the sport, so you wonder in the back of your mind, is this tire gonna hurt me? Is it gonna be as good? Well, we don’t know.”

Pierce wasn’t able to test with the new version of the tire before Cedar County and said it was virtually impossible to know the differences in race conditions.

“I really need to get some more laps on it,” he said. “I haven’t raced here at this track before, so probably a lot of it (I’m) trying to guess on a track I've never been to. It’s tough when you can't really test it back-to-back, because I was on the new tire all night tonight. I never went to the old tire.”

Initially skeptical of the new softer sidewall, Pierce said he wasn’t “really sold on it because I didn't feel great tonight. The problem is when you’re racing, you can never go out there, go make a couple of laps, pull in, change tires, go make (another) couple laps. Every time you get back out there, the track's way different, so that kind of throws a wrench in it.”

Pierce said the tire seemed to make his car feel different from time trials to his heat race to the main event.

“In the heat race, I felt like I was about to flip over, like it was leaning over a lot. Maybe that soft sidewall they talked about was soft (and the) car was leaning over,” Pierce said. “Then in the feature, I was completely opposite. So far for the first night I felt like a little inconsistent with it.”