NASCAR Senior Vice President of Competition Elton Sawyer explained why NASCAR chose to throw the caution on the final lap of the cup race at Atlanta.
During the final lap, Josh Berry found himself in the middle of a sandwich between Denny Hamlin and Ross Chastain and it did not taste good as he went nose first into the outside wall before turning down the track, making contact with the inside wall, and then going back up the track, and hitting the outside wall again. Berry was not the only car to be zig zagging across the track, Ryan Preece and Justin Haley also went from the top to bottom after making contact with Josh Berry.
A look at what happened on the backstretch during the final lap involving the No. 21 and others. pic.twitter.com/WInfHUQ61n
— NASCAR (@NASCAR) February 24, 2025
Sawyer spoke with Sirius XM NASCAR Radio to explain why the caution was thrown on the final lap. He said, “As I talked to our Cup drivers on Sunday in the drivers meeting, just reassured them that we’re not going to be racing through a debris field. If you have a situation like we did Sunday night, the wreck occurred somewhere between sixth and seventh running positions there, there’s a lot of cars still behind them. If we don’t throw the caution, you’re incentivizing the drivers to drive through that.”
“So if you look back over the last week or so and nine super speedway races that we’ve had if you count our Duels and our ARCA race, the finishes, everybody’s on top of each other so the element of a last lap caution is there, as we’ve seen. And it’s on the sanctioning body and it’s on our side to make sure that we do our absolute best, it’s our goal to get to the start/finish line under green. But there is conditions and situations where we need to throw that and we’re going to err more on throwing it than not,” he added.
Sawyer also shared that their two Race Directors are the ones who make the decision and they make it in a split-second decision. Furthermore, Sawyer shared that he now believes that these two Race Directors understand what NASCAR expects from them when it comes to throwing cautions after he had a meeting with them following the Xfinity race on Saturday.
Sawyer went on to share that NASCAR has had discussions about adjusting how it ends races to assure a green flag finish, “We will take a deeper dive to assure a green flag finish as well as the safety of all competitors and our fans alike. We will definitely take a look. We have some ideas ourself and all these ideas that are coming we’ll put them on the agenda as well. And make sure we get to the best place there.”
“There’s always the negative unintended consequences that come with a change so we need to make sure we vet through all of that before we actually make a change,” he added.
What do you make of Sawyer’s explanation and comments?
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