SVP of Competition Elton Sawyer explains how NASCAR makes caution decisions

At the season-opening Daytona 500 and in this past Sunday’s race at Atlanta, NASCAR was forced to make a decision on whether to throw a caution flag or not on the final lap of overtime.

NASCAR allowed the leaders to race to the checkered flag at Daytona and threw the caution flag at Atlanta. The inconsistency is the problem, prompting one major question: Who is the decision maker at the end of races? NASCAR Senior Vice President of Competition Elton Sawyer said Tuesday the race director makes the call, adding it’s not a collaborative effort.

Elton Sawyer: Late race caution decisions not a collaborative effort

“It’s a split-second decision by the race director. It can’t be a collaborative effort in a decision there. You don’t have time to call timeout and do you wanna call it, do you not wanna call it. That’s just not the way to do that,” Sawyer said on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. “We’ve had meetings with our race directors, and I think they have a true understanding now after Saturday night of exactly how we want to do this. I use the analogy of other sports… it’s like a quarterback that’s in the pocket getting ready to throw a pass. There’s a clock in your head that starts to wind down and you either got to pass or you got to run, or the pocket is gonna collapse.

“As a race director, it’s when the cars and trucks come off Turn 2 and you start to get middle to the back straightaway and you start to get into Turn 3, that clock starts speeding up to where you have to make a decision and it’s a split-second decision whether you hold it and let them race back or you throw the caution. We had met with a few of our Cup drivers Sunday morning, and they are in the mindset that we need to throw that in those situations. We want to get to a green flag finish for our fans, but hopefully our fans understand the reason why we had to do it the way that we did and the way we will going forward.”

Elton Sawyer speaks out about late-race cautions after Atlanta weekend

On the last lap of Sunday’s race, it looked as if Christopher Bell, Carson Hocevar and Kyle Larson were going to have a side-by-side-by-side drag race to the start/finish line. That is, until a multi-car crash behind them forced NASCAR to throw the caution flag. Bell was leading at the time the caution lights illuminated, making him the winner.

Sawyer said that the decision to throw the caution flag at Atlanta was made to avoid having drivers “racing through a debris field” and will be the standard moving forward.

“So, as I talked to our Cup drivers on Sunday in the drivers meeting, just reassured them that we’re not going to be racing through a debris field,” Sawyer said. “If you have a situation like we did Sunday night, the wreck occurred somewhere between sixth and seventh running positions there, so there’s a lot of cars behind them that if we don’t throw the caution, you’re incentivizing the competitors to drive through that.

“If you look back over the last week or so and nine superspeedway races that we’ve had if you count our Duels and ARCA race, the finishes — everyone’s on top of each other, so the element of a last lap caution is there as we’ve seen. It’s on the sanctioning body, it’s on our side to make sure that we do our absolute best. It’s our goal to get to the start/finish line under green, but there is conditions and situations where we need to throw that and we’re gonna err more on throwing it than not.”