Hail Ross! But should NASCAR ban Chastain’s wild last-corner move in future?

Part inspiration, part insanity: If you haven’t seen it already, Ross Chastain didn’t lift off, didn’t even brake for Turn 3 on the final lap of Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series Playoff race at Martinsville but instead kept his throttle foot nailed to the boards and actually changed up to fifth gear – traditionally never used at NASCAR’s tightest track.

Chastain deliberately drove into the SAFER barrier to rim-ride the turn as fast as he possibly could, and in doing so made the cut for the Championship Four finale this weekend in Phoenix. In fact, it made Cole Trickle going low, instead of high, to pass Russ Wheeler in Days of Thunder look pretty lame.

The true brilliance of Chastain’s move was its total commitment, inspired by a video game he used to play with his brother on a Nintendo GameCube in 2005. Yes, he was helped by the toughness of NASCAR’s Next Gen car – all the wheels were still pointing in the right direction at the finish when previous bodies would likely have crumpled – but the overspeed he needed to gain those five spots was considerable.

One thing to think about doing it, quite another to pull it off successfully. To appreciate its utter craziness, here is the onboard (you can hear him upshift just before impact):

And here’s the moment captured by a Chastain fan, Caleb Matthew, in the grandstand that gives a full panorama of the drama:

The physics of the move

It’s been reported that data pulled from Chastain’s beaten-but-unbowed car showed a top speed that was up to 50mph faster than a regular lap – he bounced off the wall for a full four seconds – and his momentum was such that he still had the overspeed to ram into the back of Brad Keselowski before the finish line.

Chastain’s 18.845-second final lap was faster than Kyle Larson’s pole-winning time and also eclipsed the previous track record held by Joey Logano, set in March 2014, at 18.898s. The fastest lap of the race until then was 20.508s, set Kyle Larson on Lap 7 of the 500.

The next revelation was provided by Mike Wheeler, the 23XI Racing director of competition, who worked out that Chastain pulled about 5g as he rattled around the wall, and showed his workings in this tweet:

Opinion between drivers was split in the aftermath. The majority, even Kevin Harvick – who tends to keep his praise to himself – were impressed that Chastain had gone for and executed the move:

But others, notably Larson – who tried a…