NASCAR insiders rail against decision to cut practice amid approval controversies for new drivers

When it comes to the NASCAR Cup Series, is less more? NASCAR has cut practice in recent years and now there are new controversies. In an effort to cut costs, has the sanctioning body cheapened its own product?

This season a little more practice time was added for each series. A small step in the right direction. But with complaints over one-off drivers like Helio Castroneves and Katherine Legge being underprepared for their Cup Series debuts, should something change drastically?

Jordan Bianchi and Jeff Gluck of The Athletic talked about it on The Teardown this week. There is not a series out there that does practice the way NASCAR does it. That might be a bad thing.

“I’m so tired of it. Can we have this conversation quick? I’m sorry. Like, and I understand that and I’m sorry,” Bianchi said. “Brad Keselowski said this a few weeks ago at Atlanta Motor Speedway, and I agree with him. This is one of the premiere racing series in the world. Arguably the number two behind Formula One. This is big boy, high-level stock car racing. And I understand wanting to save teams money and you shouldn’t be spending extravagant expenses, we’re not talking F1 levels here.

“To say we’re going to cut cost, we’re going to cut practice to do that, that’s not acceptable to me. There are different ways to cut costs if you’re really concerned about that, but cutting the actual on-track product I don’t agree with. I don’t like that there’s minimal practice. I don’t like the fact that you look at other racing series, pick one, have all this practice and you’re like looking at this for NASCAR and you’re like, y’all got 20 minutes? That’s it? It’s less on-track product for people at the race track. There are a lot of reasons to cut costs in NASCAR. Actually cutting practice isn’t one of them and from a lot of people I’ve talked to, they’re not really saving that much money, if at all.”

His cohost Jeff Gluck was on board with him. He even brought up the approval process drama that has gone on this season.

“It even goes back to the approval process that we were talking about earlier,” Gluck said. “Because let’s just say in Katherine Legge’s situation. Let’s say they would have said, ‘We’d like to see you do this, this and this in other series first. We want you to run Truck start, Xfinity start, let’s do that.’ So then the money she’s trying to take to Live Fast [Motorsports] you know, it’s like, ‘Well we can’t do that. We don’t have the budget to go run a Truck start and Xfinity start. This is what we have the budget for.’ … Whether it’s practice, whether it’s approval process, it’s all sort of tied together. It all goes back to resources, right? Putting people in the cars or spending more on tires.

“I hope that everybody can get together and decide something because right now it just doesn’t feel like – it just feels like it’s broken a little bit. Especially when you have a lot of these drivers saying, we are the most elite series and you shouldn’t just be able to show up and say, here I am. Look, that’s not necessarily the case because NASCAR, you know, Suárez was talking about how NASCAR was telling him, you should see the people we rejected to run Cup. Like, we rejected five people this year alone I think he was saying that.”

While having big names from outside the sport can be a good thing, give them a chance to succeed. First, let them drive the car. Then you can add testing sessions with certain teams. So a driver doesn’t get caught eyes-wide when they get into a pack or traffic with other cars.

NASCAR has to have more practices for all drivers, not just newcomers. When Lewis Hamilton or Max Verstappen decide to make their NASCAR debuts, let’s put them in the best position to compete.