Tyler Reddick came home from the NASCAR Cup Series race at Watkins Glen on Sunday and was generally dismayed at what he saw from his fellow drivers at the end of the race.
It was chaos, replete with deep dive bombs, aggressive blocks and a lot of crashing the closing stages of the race.
It left Martin Truex Jr., who is retiring at the end of the year, all the more ready to call it a career based on this recent trend.
Reddick agreed wholeheartedly.
“There is no more driver code. It’s gone,” Reddick said on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio during an interview on Tuesday. “I got home, and I was on the couch and saw Martin Truex Jr.’s postrace comments. And it’s so relatable. I completely get where he is at. I get it. You go back and watch people drive into the corner on the restarts use the car ahead as a brake pedal. It just sucks. Call me a hypocrite if you want, I’ve made my mistakes, screwed up and run people over. I just don’t like driving into the corner and using someone in front as a brake. Running someone a little wide is one thing but running someone off the track — I don’t like racing that way. I’ve been fortunate in years’ past at these road courses to be ahead of a lot of that crap.
“Yesterday was one of the few days where we just had an all-around bad day and were right there in the middle of it. Seeing it just sucks. It is what it is. I hope that it changes. But with the old car you could bump a little bit, but you would knock your radiator out. This car, it just seems like you can use your front bumper as a battering ram. You can just knock people out of the way if you want to. I think in certain situations that’s great when you’re racing mono a mono and you have to work really hard to get to someone’s bumper and give them a shot, that’s one thing. But I don’t like seeing us go into the corner like that and just use each other up. It’s hard to watch.”
It’s generally a trend in the modern NASCAR, resulting from cars that can withstand more damage and the high stakes of the current championship format.
Denny Hamlin echoed that sentiment.
“I think Martin’s had this gripe for quite some time,” Hamlin said. “It’s different now than what it used to be. There’s certainly not a whole lot of respect amongst the drivers, especially in these green-white-checkered situations. We see it over and over, year after year and it just keeps getting a little worse each year. There’s just no regard anymore. If there’s a quarter of a car width wide, someone’s gonna jam it in there in Turn 1 and if you spin, that’s not their problem.
“There’s just not enough accountability for that. If you think that someone caused a wreck, then you need to self-police this thing and make sure that they know that this was for that incident or whatever it might be. But certainly, it seems it’s not going well at the end of these races when it comes to green-white-checkereds. Guys are running over each other for one spot, but there’s not much you can do to change it. Martin just saying, ‘I’m done, I’m out of here,’ is just quintessential Martin Truex.”