NASCAR’s Elton Sawyer defends quality of racing after Talladega: ‘67 lead changes among 23 different drivers’

One of the common complaints about modern superspeedway racing is drivers’ inability to pass within the pack. That showed itself in Sunday’s Jack Link’s 500 at Talladega Superspeedway, in which multiple drivers said they were gridlocked and unable to pull out of line to make a run.

Elton Sawyer, NASCAR senior vice president of competition, hears the feedback from drivers, as well as fans watching on TV. But Sawyer also saw the crowd at Talladega cheering and standing on their feet. He saw four-wide racing which included 67 lead changes. Given that, he’s unsure what NASCAR needs to fix about the superspeedway product, he said Tuesday on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.

“When you’re sitting in race control… [you can see] our fans standing on their feet. We’re four-wide, in some cases five-wide, back to single file and our fans are standing up and cheering. And then you go look at the metrics. And you look at the stats after the race and you have 67 lead changes among 23 different drivers,” Sawyer said. “When we look at all of that, what are we trying to fix? What’s not going the way we would like it? I get it when we start talking about short track packages when we have a guy that leads 400 some laps of a 500-lap race. OK, we’re gonna do our best to try to get to work on that and figure out what we can do.

“But when you have 67 lead changes among 23 different drivers, I’m not real sure what we’re going to work on there. But as always, we wanna get better. We want to have 70 lead changes, 25 or 30 different drivers that lead races. That’s a lot of words there, but the short answer is we’re always looking at our product. Whether it’s superspeedways, road course, intermediate or short track, we’re always looking at it and trying to make it better.”

Talladega ends without the ‘Big One’

After the last round of green flag pit stops, the expectation was that things would get wild; they did not. Beyond no “Big One,” drivers back in Row 3 and beyond had nowhere to go. The result was a side-by-side finish to the line between Austin Cindric and Ryan Preece. Cindric edged out Preece by 0.022 seconds.

Kyle Larson, credited with a second-place finish after Preece’s disqualification, was one driver who couldn’t make something happen in the closing laps. He doesn’t believe he could have done anything different.

“There wasn’t really much I could do the final five laps,” Larson said after the race. I wanted to go to the outside lane when we got clear of William [Byron]. But I felt like the gap was too big to move up and the 60 [Preece] was able to fill it. I was still happy to be second row on the inside lane, obviously happy to be front row. But I just didn’t know how it was going to play out from there.

“There at the end, you’re just trying to give the right pushes to get clear. And then maybe he starts blocking lanes and something would open up for me. I was just kind of jammed up there.”