Happy Hour: Cautions, schedules and Junior
Throughout the week you can send us your best questions, jokes, rants and just plain miscellaneous thoughts to [email protected] or @NickBromberg. We’ll post them here and have a good time.
We’d normally have a post-Talladega hangover, right? Well, you probably do if you’re a Junior fan, though there have to be some Junior fans that would have preferred a much more thrilling finish. All races can’t be thrillers — no matter how much our highlight-driven world would like them to be — so it’s hard to get too worked up about the snooziness of Sunday’s race. But it’s certainly not going to be a memorable race.
Our intro topic this week is our buddy Steve Wallace, whose song Anderson Speedway is benefitting the American Cancer Society every time it’s played here. Well done, Steve.
Let’s start with Talladega, shall we?
We get what NASCAR is trying to do on the last lap. If a safety vehicle needs to be dispatched immediately, a caution will be thrown. If it doesn’t, it won’t. However, I do understand the argument that Edwards had spun in front of a lot of the field and there should be a safety incentive for drivers to slow down for the crash.
There doesn’t seem to be a feasible way to do a “local yellow” behind the crash, where the field is frozen from the point of the incident backwards. You’d need a different color flag and some rules that wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense, no matter how good-intentioned they were.
And we understand how there can be so much confusion with the seemingly borderline debris cautions during races while the last lap feels like a free-for-fall. They don’t look like they go together.
In a world where finishing under green seems paramount, there isn’t a perfect solution.
If there’s a petition for Kansas’ first race to be on the road course, we’re one of the co-sponsors. If we’re looking to add more right turns to the schedule, a roval seems a better option than a street course. Many tracks have infield road courses, so, right, there wouldn’t need to be any date relocating. And it’d be great to see how teams would set up their cars for a flat road course with a few banked turns.
It needs to happen, even if it’s an exhibition race. However, there are some logistical caveats. The track that hosts a roval race would likely lose a lot of camping spots. At Kansas, turns one and two would be wiped out in the infield as well as some other camping spots (the track hasn’t sold camping for IMSA races). It could conceivably put campers along the backstretch and in turns one and two, but any extra outside the track would not match the revenue generated from an oval race weekend.
Probably because he’s driving better equipment? OK, that’s a simple answer, and we’re not going to profess to be in Junior’s head. However, it’s clear that he’s comfortable in life outside the track and the better life on the track probably goes hand-in-hand with it. Will Junior ever win a championship? While you can’t say for certain he will, you also can’t say for certain he won’t.
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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
