The weather this past weekend was brutal for motorsports.
At Watkins Glen International, there were three short bouts of rain during the Sahlen’s Six Hours at the Glen, each of which resulted in big crashes.
New Hampshire Motor Speedway saw the schedule knocked out of whack for the entire weekend. The Modified race ended up running at 10 a.m. ET Saturday (June 22). The Cup race was moved up to a 2:06 p.m. ET green flag on Sunday (June 23), which NASCAR stuck to.
That extra 40 minutes or so ended up being pretty critical. Had they started at the originally scheduled time, they would have struggled to make it to halfway before the rain showed up. Worse, it likely wouldn’t have been possible to finish the race before darkness fell, knowing what we know now.
You would have had a 160-lap race instead of 305. If the spate of cautions that we got ended up coming before halfway, then you could have been in a situation where NASCAR comes back on Monday to complete the race since they couldn’t have run the 301-lap scheduled distance Sunday.
NASCAR ultimately stopped the race before the lightning got within eight miles of the track. That was helped by the race already being under yellow for an unrelated reason (Kyle Busch’s second crash of the day).
During the delay, NBC Sports spent the first 20 minutes or so interviewing a number of drivers and crew chiefs. Then, the shutdown occurred due to lightning. In this scenario, Parker Kligerman and Marty Snider set up camp in what looked like the NASCAR Xfinity Series garage to anchor coverage. Kim Coon chipped in with interviews from a safe area.
There was also some alternate coverage from Iowa that kicked in at 6 p.m. ET. During that time, there were plenty of updates from back in Loudon. Anyone watching would have had no doubt as to what was going on at the track.
Now, did the red flag need to be as long as it was?
At least 80% of it.
You can’t race with lightning around and a lot of the rain was pretty heavy. We saw Sunday in Watkins Glen that even sports cars can’t do much with standing water. The No. 5 Porsche at the beginning of this clip was on rain tires.
Last year, I talked about how I compare NASCAR’s rain tire setup on ovals as “working as designed,” but designed incorrectly. In the Truck race at Martinsville in April of last year, the Trucks used the rain tires for approximately 30 laps. My thoughts at the time were that NASCAR waited far…
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