NASCAR senior vice president of competition Elton Sawyer agreed with the general consensus that it took too long for race control to call the final caution on Saturday in the Xfinity Series race at the Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval.
Parker Kligerman was the leader at the time, and had fended off several advances from Sam Mayer, when Leland Honeyman Jr. stuffed his car in a tire barrier. Kligerman was seeking his first career win in the second-tier division just weeks after announcing he was retiring from full-time competition.
Both drivers needed nothing less than a win to advance to the Round of 8 in the playoffs.
It took around 40 seconds from the time of the incident for race control to call the caution. Had officials waited another second, Kligerman would have won the race. It was effectively the correct call, but waiting so long, with Kligerman a foot away from his first win, left the industry feeling frustrated with the timing.
Mayer went on to pass Kligerman on the restart to win the race.
“It did take too long,” Sawyer said on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio on Tuesday morning. “I met with our team (on) Saturday night. We went through what happened there. We made some adjustments overnight as far as camera angles so that our replay operator could be able to see that quicker, to be able to get that information to the race director. We made an adjustment over Saturday night, felt like we’re in a much better place on Sunday. That’s a call that we wanted to get to quicker, but you got to have the information.”
Race control does not watch the television broadcast because it does not have control of the feed, which had the crash in real-time, but Sawyer again conceded the event needed more information more quickly to avoid that situation.
“You look at road course racing on the Roval, there’s a lot of officiating that has to be done with cameras and that’s not something that we do every week,” Sawyer said. “It’s something we have to work on and be prepared for.
“I thought our team did a good job getting the angles that we would need, obviously with the reconfiguration and then running a race. Again, we felt like we needed to make that call sooner than we did. So, we made some adjustments and felt like we had the angles we needed on Sunday. We’ll log this in our notebook and be prepared for next October when we go back there.”
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.