NASCAR’s senior vice president of competition, Elton Sawyer, returned to the SiriusXM Radio airways for his weekly spot to discuss the big issues of the week.
The most notable was Kyle Busch being eliminated from the Daytona 500 on Sunday after his involvement in the crash with 15 laps to go triggered by Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and Joey Logano. Busch took a critical tone to NASCAR, accusing race control of not understanding its new Damaged Vehicle Policy procedures, from jacking cars with flat tires at the scene of the crash to the attempts to meet minimum speed.
Busch returned to the track and then returned to garage before the green flag and before meeting minimum speed and not understanding that rule led to their elimination.
“Got beat by NASCAR procedures again, just not being able to get back out on the racetrack,” Busch said. I had four flat tires out there. And we have these air jack systems in the car, mandatory by NASCAR, and the guy carries around an empty air bottle to plug up to the car. So couldn’t plug it up so I could make my own return back to pit road.
“I said I just wanted a push, so they decided for three laps how to hook it up, to tow us back in. They towed us in to a work area, where our guys reviewed the car and didn’t see anything massively wrong. All the wheels were pointed in the right direction. We put four new tires on it to go back out to basically see what the next process was going to be for us.
“And then was told that if we needed to work on it and repair it, you need to go back to that place (the work area in the Cup garage), but if you go back to that place, they park you.”
“I think it was a misunderstanding on Kyle’s, perspective,” Sawyer said on The Morning Drive. “… What we do on pit road as far as the damaged vehicle policy hasn’t changed from 2024 other than we’re giving an additional minute — it’s now seven minutes versus six.
“But as far as what our fans, and our competitors, what they witnessed last year in the past five or six years, the DVP policy looks the same on pit road with the adjustments that I mentioned.
“The one thing that we added this year is, at the scene of the incident, if you can’t drive away, we would hook the vehicle and we would tow it to the garage. Once you go to the garage, you’re going to get one opportunity to leave the garage and go on the racetrack. And this is not a new rule either — you get one opportunity at three consecutive green laps to meet minimum speed. Once you do that, you reset and you’re kind of back in the game.
“In Kyle’s case, he went out, left the garage, came back in and once you do that, then you’re going to be eliminated from the event. The reason that this rule was put in place the way it is was that if we didn’t have a way to basically have an end to the DVP part of it where you could reset, then what would happen is the competitors would go in the garage, work on the car a little bit, go back out, run one lap, come back in. They would do that multiple times, and that’s just kind of circumventing the purpose of the rules. So I think it was clearly just a misunderstanding. We had multiple meetings in the off season with the teams and the drivers, multiple drivers came by throughout the week and had questions about the policy and making sure that they were clear. It was unfortunate for Kyle and the RCR team because they had a really good car.”
Last lap cautions
There is a general inconsistency, objectively, in which NASCAR calls last lap race ending cautions. On one hand, every crash is different but NASCAR aims to keep the finish green if cars are not going to be racing back through the scene.
But during the second duel on Thursday night, the race ended under caution for a crash behind the leaders, and the reason provided is that NASCAR said it wanted to get safety vehicles moving faster due to the hard hits taken.
Sawyer said his team will go back through to see if things could have been done differently.
“When you look at it holistically and you look at it from a 30,000 foot view, our number one goal and we’ve talked about this many times on the show is to finish our races under green flag conditions,” Sawyer said. “That is what our fans pay for and that’s what our competitors want. That’s what we want as a sanctioning body. That’s to be able to take the checkered flag under green flag conditions and the competitors racing as hard as they can.
“That is goal number one and will always be. There is cases, as we know, especially at superspeedway races, once the white flag comes out, we are getting ready to pay points, we’re getting ready to pay money (and) the excitement and the aggressiveness, it, it picks up. The pushing and the shoving, you know, trying to get in position to win at Daytona, it gets big.
“So we have to really be on our toes and credit to our race directors (because) it’s not an easy task for them. Again, goal number one is to try to get them back to the start finish line. Goal number two is to make sure that if there is an incident, we can dispatch safety equipment as quickly as possible. In some cases, we can start doing that — depending on when the accident is — if it’s behind the field or at the tail of the field and we’re not going to have to run the competitors through that incident, then we can start dispatching safety equipment.
“It’s a completely different situation where we’ve got people trying to race through an incident. We’ll go back today as we always do, and we’ll look at every race that we had this past weekend, with our team in the tower and we’ll dissect it and look at it in conditions that are a lot easier to discuss today than as you`re sitting there in the moment and we have chaos that’s going on and we’re trying to make a very calculated decision or the race directors are, in a split second.
“But first and foremost, number one, our goal is to finish under green conditions. That’s what our fans pay to see. That’s what our audience at home wants to see. That’s what our competitors want. So we will do everything in our power to do that with number two, being in a safe environment.”
Preece crash
NASCAR has already begun taking a second look at the Preece car after his second violent airborne crash in three years at The World Center of Racing.
“Yeah, first and foremost, it was great to see Ryan get out of the car and it was in a very short period of time. You know, he rides to the infield care center and we get the notification in race controls that the drivers (have been) evaluated and released in a short period of time — so that’s good news that he’s doing well.
“Number two, it’s something that we will continue to work on and we have been, and the team at the back, Dr. (Eric) Jacuzzi and his team will continue to dissect exactly what happened. On the eye test for all of us, looking at the replay, when Ryan, basically got up on the side of the 20 car and once the front of the car is up in the air, obviously we’re getting into a situation there.
“The front stayed up for a while, but once the car started to turn, the air started to see the side of it. I’m not an aerodynamicist (and) I don’t claim to be, but I know the guys in the back will dissect that. We’ll go over this morning, in this particular case, our team at the racetrack, Eric and his team and Brandon Thomas and the team looked at the car (and) felt like all the safety stuff did what we needed it to do so we allowed the team to put it in their transporter, bring it back here to Concord, and the RFK shop is right across the street from us so we’ll send our folks over there this morning to start looking through that, working closely with Ryan and the team and the folks at RFK to see what we can learn. And then we will, if there (are) things that come out of that that we can implement going forward as we’ve done in the past, we will continue to do that.”
