It's called Monkey see, Monkey do.   If Matt Sheppard or Stewart Friesen painted their tires pink, the pits would be filled with pink tires. 

sure is...remember the days when they put Styrofoam discs as wheel covers...and the ArmourAll on the sidewalls???

I kinda remember stopping bye a few garages unannounced and seeing some guy in the corner painting a "contaminate" on the INSIDE of an unmounted asphalt tire.

Once in the pits at EWS Ken Brenn was telling people about the time he was spraying the old liquid snow chain on his midget tires.  The next week everybody was putting it on the midget tires except Ken, he was sitting laughing at all of them.

I would grind off the compound numbers on my tires and cover them with black silicone when I ran micros and quarter midgets. Also covered the right rear and that drove people crazy. Another deal was I would take a gear and change it after warmups and clean it off and put it in the box and then take the same gear out and put it back in and watch everyone come over and ask me what I was doing and I give them some bs and watch them go and change their gears . I had a lot of double sets of gears so I would leave the gear I took out and leave it on the trailer and hit the same gear in and walk away and watch the guys come over and look at it after they tried to look at my tires . Man they were fun times.

Here's another one.....asphalt modified. We made a few suspension changes that, if I'm being generous, could be considered in the "gray area". Car picked up two tenths easily. Prior to track day, back in the shop, I figured that if these changes worked, everybody and their brother would be crawling all over the car in the pits. In anticipation, I bent up a couple of small wings and a few channels/air dams, and Dzused them onto the sheet metal interior. Sure enough, here come a couple of fellow drivers with the officials. I'm ordered to remove these fugazee contraptions. I put up a good fuss but eventually relent. Everyone walks away smiling and back slapping because they found the illegal speed parts. With their attention diverted, no one had bothered to look under the car!! 

Lettem use what they want............how bow dat?

I have  somebody ( mostly me) grind or buff  the tire surface with 36 grit sand paper, or a something similar during the week  and then wrap the tires to keep the tread surface from "oxidizing"  and then you remove the plastic on Saturday , you have clean fresh rubber. 

At one racetrack out here  they put down asphalt millings in the pits and people were concerned over  " the oil" in the millings affecting their tires

wrapping the tires when new keeps them from "curing"

left to open air they start to harden.  grinding the tires between races opens up the pores after they glaze over from heat cycles