Kevin Harvick takes major issue with NASCAR over controversial final caution
Kevin Harvick had a major problem with NASCAR‘s timing on when they decided to throw the caution flag out during the second overtime of Sunday’s Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Ryan Preece spun out in Turn 2 as the leaders carried on under green. Preece made an effort to get going and NASCAR certainly allowed him to, but since he was out of fuel and had a tire down, he couldn’t go anywhere. NASCAR decided to throw out the yellow flag after Kyle Larson, the leader of the race, had taken the white flag, thus signifying the end of the race. Larson took the checkered flag under caution.
Harvick felt the caution was mismanaged by NASCAR and created a controversy when there didn’t need to be one.
Kevin Harvick calls out NASCAR
“I thought the call at the end of our race was not good,” Harvick said on his “Happy Hour” podcast. “When Preece spun out, he was mid-pack. He wound up nosing into the fence barely and the tire was flat. He was on the rub blocks, the tire was flat, he was not going anywhere. And they waited and waited and waited and he wasn’t moving sitting up on the racetrack. The caution should have been thrown in Turn 4. And it just doesn’t seem there’s as much consistency as there needs to be when it comes to these calls at the end of the race. Whether you throw a caution or not throw a caution.
“I didn’t like how the race ended with the caution not being thrown. … Whoever was watching that needs to be talked to. Because the tire was down… it was sitting on the rub blocks. And when they sit on the rub blocks, they don’t move. I just believe that was a missed call. A badly missed call.”
Had the caution been called before Larson took the white flag, a third overtime restart would have commenced. Would that have changed the outcome? We’ll truly never know, but Elton Sawyer, NASCAR senior vice president of competition, believes the sanctioning body made the correct decision.
Elton Sawyer: NASCAR ‘did a really good job’ managing last lap caution flag decision
“For our fans, our goal at every event is to finish under green,” Sawyer said Tuesday on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, via Dustin Long of NBC Sports. “That is what our goal is going into the weekend. But there’s circumstances that happened on the last lap at Indy. And I will go back to last year at Pocono, very similar situation with the same car. I might add, the 41. Both, we’re trying to give that car every opportunity to get started, get rolling and let the race end naturally.
“As we came off Turn 4 and coming to the start-finish line for the white flag [at Indy], it’s a two-and-a-half-mile racetrack, so you still have a lot of racing that can happen. As the cars started to get off in Turn 1, you’re starting to get closer to having to make a decision. That’s our process. That’s our mindset. The same as it was last year at Pocono. I believe the 41 had spun there in the tunnel turn.
“Again, you give … the drivers every opportunity to get going but also the guys that are leading … As they are racing, you can’t let them race through a situation where you’ve got a car stopped on the racetrack. So that was our decision process and how we kind of digest that very quickly. I might add we have now had the opportunity for 24 hours, 48 hours to kind of digest it. And I still go back and think our race director did a really good job in the way he managed that.”