Ryan Blaney‘s window net debacle in the All-Star Race happened five days ago — everything that can be said about that incident has already been said — but I still can’t get over how it’s just the latest step down a bad road for NASCAR safety.
In case you missed it, Blaney was like 50 feet from taking the checkered flag when a caution that shouldn’t have been a caution flew because Ricky Stenhouse Jr. hit the wall and kept going. Normally, the race would’ve been over. But because it was the All-Star Race, the race has to end under caution, which is a great move. It’s just the situation that brought out the caution that was questionable, something that NASCAR Senior Vice President of Competition Scott Miller admitted they messed up on after the race.
I get why they threw that caution. The race was super boring, and the hope is that you’ll at least give the fans a good finish with a green-white-checkered. It was essentially an entertainment caution, just like all competition cautions are, just like the old phantom debris cautions were, just like the caution that kept Carl Edwards from winning the 2016 championship was and just like the caution that helped Chase Elliott get into the Round of 8 in 2019 was.
The entertainment cautions did not exist until the past 20 years or so. Dale Earnhardt Jr. reflected on the switch in mentality in this week’s Dale Jr. Download podcast.
“If you’re managing a race or overseeing an event, you’re mentality ought to be, ‘I do not want to throw a yellow. I really need a good reason for me to have to stop this race, pause this race,’” Earnhardt said. “That was sort of the way NASCAR operated since its existence, all the way up until somewhere around the early 2000s. … We had those fake debris yellows. You’d have a yellow in the middle of a race, and TV wouldn’t be able to show you where this debris was because it didn’t exist.
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