NASCAR’s Steve O’Donnell openly admits it was a rough night. “Rough” only begins to cover it. Saturday night’s regular season finale at Richmond Raceway will go down as the sport’s biggest officiating blunder to date.
Not just because of a caution with three laps to go for a car scraping the wall. Or because of the ambulance at the entrance of pit road that made drivers play a real-life game of Frogger. It wasn’t even because of the caution for brake smoke from Matt Kenseth early in the going.
Any one of those in isolation would have been bad enough. To have all three in one race created an embarrassment that the sport did not need. After encumbered wins tainted Darlington, prompting many to debate what is and isn’t cheating, NASCAR needed to have a night where the attention was on locking in its playoff field, and crowning Martin Truex Jr. the regular season champion. Instead, pit road reeked of confusion and frustration after the race, rather than excitement.
The expressions and body language of Truex and crew chief Cole Pearn told you everything you needed to know about the Derrike Cope caution on Lap 398 of 400. That caution erased a healthy Truex lead, and set up NASCAR overtime. By the time the mayhem was over, Truex had been stuffed in the Turn 1 wall, while Kyle Larson stole the victory and five more playoff points.
“You’re out there dominating like this, you know your car is not very good on restarts for a couple laps. [A] caution for a guy that shouldn’t even be out there is kind of ridiculous,” said Truex during an awkward presentation of the regular season championship trophy. “I don’t know. I don’t really know what to say about all that.
“It’s unfortunate, the way the race ended. I’m madder about the caution than Denny [Hamlin] getting into us. We talked; I know he didn’t do it on purpose. He jumped on the brakes, got on the splitter. [I] gave him room, but he was aggressive on the brakes. That stuff happens. Really upset about the caution. … It’s tough to lose them like that.”
Yes, questionable cautions remain on the bingo card this week. While it was clear Cope hit the wall, whether the contact warranted a caution and if Cope, who was more than a handful of laps down, should have still been on the track, is up for debate. NASCAR will go forward having to convince the public track conditions needed immediate attention. At least O’Donnell did admit the caution on Lap 88 when Kenseth, who was leading, locked the brakes up going into Turn 3, was a mistake.
Having never been a NASCAR official, I can only imagine there is a lot to take in during a live event. Getting every call or non-call right 100 percent of the time is an unreasonable expectation. Except we’re not done with this mess.
An ambulance blocking pit road under a Lap 257 caution because the driver didn’t listen to a directive to stop? Are you kidding me? Watching it unfold live was in equal parts unbelievable and infuriating, and still is when thinking back on it after the weekend. To use terminology that probably remains taboo since the stink left by Michael Waltrip Racing and Spin-gate at Richmond in 2013 still hasn’t cleared: it changed the outcome of a race.
Kenseth still made the playoffs – thankfully for NASCAR – but he suffered a DNF when he could have been contending for the win. On the other hand, Clint Bowyer did not make the playoffs because he never had the opportunity to go for the win because his top 10 car was damaged during the incident. Bowyer fell back in the field, and eventually suffered two pit road penalties.
“I don’t think they should open pit road if there’s an ambulance parked there. It’s a very narrow entry,” said Kenseth. “Pit road speed is pretty fast – 45 miles an hour or something – and, you know, I still shouldn’t have hit the car in front of me, but I can’t say I was expecting to see an ambulance blocking me. So by the time I looked up and saw him parked there and they were stopping in front of me, I tried the best I could to stop, and couldn’t.”
To his credit, Kenseth handled the situation well in all his interviews. Others, like Truex, were more direct, and said what many were probably thinking when asked about the incident.
“Whoever hits the button to open pit road needs to pay attention to what’s going on on the racetrack. That’s what I was thinking,” said Truex. “It’s not like it was a big surprise. It didn’t happen in a split second. The emergency vehicles were riding down the backstretch next to us as soon as we came off of [Turn] 2, and continued all the way until the opening of pit road, and they just left pit road open. Somebody obviously wasn’t paying attention, or wasn’t doing their job properly. And in my opinion, at this level, it’s inexcusable.”
As is any NASCAR race, especially a playoff-deciding one, looking like amateur hour.