"A lot of that was tyre-related," Lisles added, "The tyres are now so much better that they do not degrade anything like they used to. In the old days, if you had the car set-up to use new tyres, it was almost certainly horrible on old tyres. That's where the wise and clever drivers would forgo some immediate new tyre performance because they knew that, in the long-term, they were going to have to deal with worn tyres and that's where they could make a lot of progress.
"It was almost inevitable that the guy who was going to win the race was not the guy who jumped out into the lead in the first ten laps. And you had people like Mario and
Michael and Rick Mears and Al Unser Jr who learned early on what it took. Often, they probably wouldn't even qualify well because they were more interested in the race set-up.
"They'd fall back to eighth or something at the start, and then, all of a sudden, halfway through a fuel stint, they'd be charging by everybody and going into the lead. Then there would be a yellow and they might drop back a little bit and then they'd be back up in the lead again. I think that was largely a result of the tyres, and the fact that the cars were not flat all the way around the track."
It's too bad that so much of that has been removed from the sport because it was a great challenge for both drivers and teams. It really separated the best of the thinking, technical drivers, and the teams who could properly support them, from the rest. It also made for interesting, constantly-changing races with cars passing and repassing as they alternatively fell back or came on strong.
"I don't know that there's a solution to the problem," Lisles observed, "It's like you can't uninvent aerodynamics. We all know about ground effect. Even NASCAR teams use ground effect and they've got a big, bumpy underneath to the car. But nevertheless, everybody knows about ground effect. They know the basics of how to make it work. You can't get away from it because it's there.
