NASCAR insiders call out repeated officiating issues after Atlanta, Daytona incidents

Jeff Gluck and Jordan Bianchi of The Athletic took NASCAR to task for their repeated officiating issues throughout the first two weeks of the season on the latest episode of The Teardown.

It’s been a tough two weeks for officiating in the sport, as inconsistency has been the name of the game when it comes to throwing the caution on the final lap. Evidently, Gluck and Bianchi believe it ruined what could’ve been an epic finish in Atlanta over the weekend, and it’s a shame this debate continues to rage.

“Unfortunately, we’re talking a lot about officiating, and we shouldn’t be talking about officiating, and we’re talking about it way too much after nearly every race this season,” Bianchi proclaimed. “That’s not good. It’s like every other sport. You don’t want to talk about the referees. The games are the best when you don’t even know the referees are there. Unfortunately, right now — doesn’t matter the series. Truck Series, we had a DQ. Xfinity Series, we have different things. Qualifying races for the Daytona 500. The Daytona 500. It just goes on and on, right? Like, one thing after another.

“It seems like every time the cars are on the track in a race, there’s some kind of consistency issue. What is a caution? What doesn’t cause a caution? We’re two weeks into this thing, and we’re already talking about this. That’s really tough.”

Evidently, Bianchi doesn’t have a problem with NASCAR throwing the caution for Sunday’s last-lap wreck, but he understands why fans are up in arms with the finish, due to the string of officiating issues throughout the sport.

“I think if you objectively step back and look at tonight’s accident, and I watched it right before we hopped on here, I don’t think you can say that [doesn’t] warrant a caution,” Bianchi added. “There was numerous cars involved. You had cars hitting the wall head on. Like, this is a smaller track. This isn’t a Daytona 2.5 mile. It’s a mile-and-a-half racetrack. You don’t know — this warranted a caution. In a vacuum by itself, if you take away everything else, everybody would’ve been like, ‘Yep, that’s a caution.’ There’d been no argument, nobody up in arms.

“The problem is, the precedent that’s been set, it’s been changed so many times. So, we don’t know. We’re having this conversation when we should have to have this conversation. Instead, we should be talking about what was still a very good finish, which was an exciting, really exciting final, 45 laps or so, that had everybody on the edge of their seat. Instead, we’re talking again about officiating. That’s frustrating.”

Alas, it’s certainly disappointing that officiating is the hot topic at the moment for NASCAR, and fans and media members alike are hoping that won’t be the case next weekend. COTA is on the schedule, so perhaps it’ll be a different story for the Cup Series in Texas.