Daytona 500: Elton Sawyer addresses NASCAR decision not to throw caution flag on last lap

NASCAR’s senior vice of competition Elton Sawyer knows NASCAR drivers and fans are wondering why a caution flag was not thrown during the final lap of the Daytona 500. While appearing on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio this week, Sawyer explained why a flag wasn’t thrown after a crash occurred during the last lap.

“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, per Sportsnaut. “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 picks up. The pushing and the shoving, you know, trying to get in position to win at Daytona, it gets big.”

Elton Sawyer shares more on no caution flag at Daytona 500

Sawyer continued, “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.”

On the final lap of the Daytona 500, Denny Hamlin and Austin Cindric were involved in a crash. Both drivers were on top of the field, and the crash led to William Byron winning the race for the second consecutive year.

“It’s a completely different situation where we’ve got people trying to race through an incident,” Sawyer added. “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.”