So far, the 2022 NASCAR Cup Series playoffs have been a bit wacky. I don’t recall a time in which playoff drivers failed to win the first two races (Bubba Wallace’s win did lock the No. 45 in the owners’ Round of 12, but that’s the owner’s playoffs). Kansas saw more shenaniganry and interesting things to look at.
Entering Sunday’s race, there were a couple of big stories. First, you had the fallout from Darlington. Kevin Harvick was an angry man after his car went up in flames late in the race, as seen in Frontstretch‘s video below:
In order to hopefully decrease the potential of fires, NASCAR issued a technical bulletin that made a number of rule changes. These changes included the introduction of a stainless steel piece near the exhaust to replace composite material and a piece to prevent rubber from getting to the exhaust.
These changes were shown to viewers using a fairly substantial computer graphic that gave an excellent idea of just what will be going on. Given the location of all of these new pieces (some of which that the teams might be able to make themselves instead of buying bespoke from a vendor), you wouldn’t notice any of it during a broadcast, but it is still very important to know that NASCAR is actually doing something to stop this ridiculousness.
Harvick was on Countdown to Green, discussing the situation. Since his interview rants in Darlington (both on USA and with the general media, linked above), he’s spent a fair amount of time in communication with NASCAR. Going forward, it’s going to be important for NASCAR to be transparent about these kinds of issues with the car. It appears that Harvick is satisfied that they’ve at least done something on this issue. There were no issues with random fires during Sunday’s race. Problem is, Harvick indicated that the fires were a known issue as much as a full year ago or more.
“Let’s solve some problems.”@KevinHarvick addressed the changes #NASCAR has recently made in the interest of driver safety. pic.twitter.com/BEPt666DvI
— NASCAR on NBC (@NASCARonNBC) September 11, 2022
If what Harvick says is true, then NASCAR screwed this up badly. They knew about it, but didn’t do anything. They needed to have a fix for the fires a long time ago. Harvick shouldn’t have to light fires under the butt cheeks of NASCAR officials to get something like this done. The thoughts coming out of pre-race was that if…
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