By David Morgan, Associate Editor
TALLADEGA, Ala. – To fuel save or not to fuel save, that is the question.
Coming out of the Daytona 500, one of the major talking points was the rising prevalence of fuel saving at superspeedways and the effect it is having on the racing at those types of tracks.
It appears more of the same will be true when the green flag drops on Sunday’s GEICO 500 at Talladega.
The overwhelming consensus from the driving corps will be that fuel saving will be the dominant strategy of the day. With lightning-fast pit stops in the Next Gen era and tire wear being almost nonexistent, the less time you have to spend on pit road, the better.
“Something will have to drastically change for us to not do that now,” said Joey Logano. “The whole field knows it. The whole field plays the game and I don’t see that changing.”
Tyler Reddick lamented the change to a fuel saving strategy on the superspeedway and how it had taken some of the enjoyment out of racing on these types of tracks.
“It’s not [enjoyable],” Reddick said. “Everyone’s competitive and they’re gonna try a way to do it the best, but, yeah, it’s a lot more fun to be racing hard, wide open the whole time, right? Where you’re trying to set yourself up for the stage ends.
“But in all honesty, once everyone kind of gets going wide open in this car, we kind of just stall out and there’s not a lot of movers and shakers. What’s made the moving and shaking throughout the field the last couple times has been those who are saving fuel versus those who are not. I think everyone’s just figured out that it’s just more important to save fuel than it is to go and get to the front.”
Noah Gragson added that the changed landscape brought on by the Next Gen car and its nuances on drafting tracks is only exacerbated by the need to save fuel.
While drivers may have the ability to form a third lane and run three-wide at times, it really is an optical illusion of what is really going on behind the wheel.
“Everybody’s kind of figured out that’s the best thing to do is just ride around, save fuel,” Gragson said. “Whoever can take the least amount of fuel under the pit stops, spend the least time on pit road, you cycle up to the front so you just might as well save.
“But everybody’s saving from first all the way on back, so you can go and try and make that third lane work and then you can drive up to the front. But…
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