Kevin Harvick had a major problem with NASCARThe timing came when they decided to throw the yellow flag during the second overtime of Sunday’s Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Ryan Preece spun in Turn 2 as the leaders continued their race under the green flag. Preece made an effort to get going again and NASCAR certainly let him, but with his fuel gone and a flat tire, he couldn’t go anywhere. NASCAR decided to throw a yellow flag after race leader Kyle Larson took the white flag, effectively ending the race. Larson took the checkered flag under the yellow flag.
Harvick felt the caution was mishandled by NASCAR and created controversy when it didn’t need to be.
Kevin Harvick Denounces NASCAR
“I thought the call at the end of our race was wrong,” Harvick said on his “Happy Hour” podcast. “When Preece spun, he was in the middle of the pack. He ended up barely hitting the fence and the tire was flat. He was on the crash blocks, the tire was flat, he wasn’t going anywhere. And they waited and waited and waited and he wasn’t moving sitting on the track. The caution should have come out in Turn 4. And there doesn’t seem to be as much consistency as there should be when it comes to those late-race decisions. Whether you throw a caution or not.
“I didn’t like the way the race ended without the yellow flag being thrown. … Whoever was watching that needs to be contacted. Because the tire was down… it was sitting on the skid blocks. And when they sit on the skid blocks, they don’t move. I just think it was a mistake. A big mistake.”
Had the penalty been issued before Larson took the white flag, a third overtime would have been called. Would that have changed the outcome? We’ll never know for sure, but Elton Sawyer, NASCAR’s senior vice president of racing, believes the sanctioning body made the right call.
Elton Sawyer: ‘NASCAR did a great job’ handling last-lap yellow flag decision
“For our fans, our goal at every event is to finish under the green flag,” Sawyer said. said Tuesday the SiriusXM NASCAR Radiovia Dustin Long of NBC Sports“That’s our goal for the weekend. But there are circumstances that happened on the last lap at Indy. And I’ll go back to last year at Pocono, a very similar situation with the same car. I might add, the 41. We’re trying to give that car every opportunity to start, run and let the race finish naturally.
“Coming out of Turn 4 and coming to the start-finish line for the white flag (at Indy), it’s a two-and-a-half-mile track, so there’s still a lot of racing that can happen. As the cars start to come out of Turn 1, you start to get closer to having to make a decision. That’s our process. That’s our mindset. It was the same as last year at Pocono. I think the 41 spun in the Tunnel Turn.
“Again, you give the drivers every opportunity to go, but also the drivers who are in the lead. During the race, you can’t let them run in a situation where a car is stopped on the track. So that’s our decision-making process and how we digested that very quickly. I would add that we’ve now had the opportunity to digest that for 24 or 48 hours. And I still think our race director has done a very good job in the way he’s handled that.”
