Brad Keselowski has never been shy about answering a question, and on Wednesday at the NASCAR Playoffs media day, the Team Penske driver offered a candid response when asked if he was concerned about the ambulance response time.
“My expectations are already very low to begin with,” Keselowski said with a laugh. “It doesn’t really worry me. Our goal is simply to make the car perfect, so you don’t have to worry about it.
The topic of ambulance problems, as well as NASCAR officiating, has come up more than once following a wayward ambulance stopping at the entrance to pit road over the weekend last at Richmond Raceway. While Keselowski scored The Saturday evening incident considered a freak occurrence, others said it was something NASCAR needed to continue to resolve.
“Ambulances, for whatever reason this year, have been a little more problematic getting to the scene, coming back from the accident, getting lost in a lot of circumstances getting back to the field care center,” Kevin Harvick said . “There are some things they need to work on on the NASCAR side to clean those things up. We heard Steve O’Donnell speak and recognize it, we need to fix this and improve it, and that’s the most important thing.
Harvick revealed there have been two incidents this season in which the ambulance got lost while transporting him to the on-field care center. Matt Kenseth said the same thing happened to him in the Richmond spring race.
“I rode around the field for about five minutes with him. He was lost and couldn’t find the health center. Luckily, I didn’t bleed to death,” Kenseth said. “Then I think the other one is after California or something. He drove so recklessly that it threw me off the bench and I almost hit my head in the ambulance.
Although Jimmie Johnson said he hasn’t had the same problems, he noted that the drivers council reported them to NASCAR. He thanked the sanctioning body for making a change to ensure this does not happen again. Johnson was also one of the drivers who said he would favor a traveling medical team, like that used in the IndyCar Series.
Unfortunately for NASCAR, the ambulance isn’t the only thing that has people talking as the most important part of the season looms.
The timing of cautions and the way NASCAR officiates a race, particularly late in the race, came into question after Martin Truex Jr. criticized a caution on Lap 398 at Richomnd for Derrike Cope scraping the wall. Truex said NASCAR has been consistent in how it’s called cautions throughout the year, but Saturday night was a departure from that.
“That’s really what I wanted to talk to Steve (O’Donnell) about, why did they issue that warning? From what I could see, there was no real reason. Somebody jumped the gun on that one,” Truex said. “Dale (Earnhardt) Jr.’s tweet this week about Carl Edwards losing his championship last year (at Homestead) to a tip-off, it’s hard not to think about that. If we’re in the same situation at Homestead and this happens, which happened to us Saturday night, it would be really, really hard to take.
“They just have to make sure they are consistent and make the right decision when the pressure is on. I mean, that’s their job. This is what they must do. If there is a real reason to be cautious, then no one can say anything about it. Yes, that should have been a warning. So do the right thing and make the right call at the right time.
Consistency in warnings is what all drivers seemed to agree on. Also recognizing that NASCAR is going to be in a tough spot regardless, no drivers have expressed concerns that troubles like Richmond’s could happen again. But it’s something that concerns everyone.
“I definitely talked to them,” Denny Hamlin said. “They looked at it as what happens when a driver has a bad race – hey, they move on to the next race. Unless an NBA referee trips a player and then that player gets hurt, I don’t know what the connection is.
“It was just weird for me. It’s frustrating because there should be one constant in NASCAR, and that’s how races are called and officiated.
