Why was Talladega Superspeedway surprisingly clean last weekend?
Kurt Busch has been out for months with concussion symptoms and Alex Bowman has been ruled out for the last two weekends with concussion symptoms as well. And with the announcement that Cody Ware will be sitting out on Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race at the Charlotte Motor Speedway ROVAL (Oct. 9), there will be three drivers simultaneously sitting out from injury for the first time since at least 2004.
It has been an ominous two weeks, and the fact that Talladega was on the schedule last Sunday (Oct. 2) didn’t help. With safety on everyone’s mind, Last week, I wrote that drivers should have the right to sit out if they felt overly concerned about racing at Talladega.
That didn’t happen. The Big One never happened either. The NASCAR Xfinity Series race on Saturday (Oct. 1) had every car running at the finish and the 500-miler for Cup had only three cars retire due to crash damage. Both races ended in photo finishes, and neither was dragged out due to crashes at the finish. With the concerns heading into the weekend, the outcome of last weekend was a relief.
The tranquil races at Talladega came on the heels of a destructive weekend at Daytona International Speedway in August. While numerous cars crashed in the rain during the Cup race, both the Xfinity race and the first half of the Cup race were not short of crashes caused by aggressive driving.
That weekend, along with the concerns heading into Talladega, may have influenced how the Cup race played out. A third lane rarely formed, and drivers were mostly stuck in a tug of war for 188 laps as the inside lane tried to prevail over the outside and vice versa. Drivers were pushing the cars in front of them, but there was only one incident due to a bad bump. There were few egregious blocks, and in a two-lap shootout to decide the finish, not a single car crashed before the checkered flag waved.
Both the Cup and Xfinity finishes were impressive for the way that they ended. Instead of pulling an aggressive move that wadded up half the field, drivers running in 10th appeared resigned to the fact that they couldn’t make magic happen after the white flag. All the aggressive moves happened up front, but no one up front threw caution to the wind either.
It was a welcoming sign, and the owners likely appreciated not having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on repairs. We’ll see at Daytona next year if the same kind of…
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