All anyone is talking about this week is the latest restart in Richmond. Kevin Harvick also joined the discussion this week. THE NASCAR The FOX analyst and Cup Series champion had an interesting take on the controversy.
Kevin Harvick watched the final restart at Richmond from the pits. He has participated in numerous overtime restarts during his career. He is therefore the ideal person to speak on this subject. Harvick is as uninvolved as possible. He’s not a fan, he wasn’t in the race.
The Closer thinks NASCAR can do things differently. Perhaps using a method similar to that used to impose speeding penalties on pit roads.
“I’m of the opinion that if you’re going to draw a line on the track, you should use that line,” Harvick said during his speech. Happy Hour podcast. “If your football team gets on the line, you’re out of bounds, right? If the ball doesn’t cross the plane, is it a touchdown? I think if you want to draw a line on a race track to arbitrate a situation, yeah, none of us want NASCAR involved, but NASCAR wouldn’t even need to be involved.
“Put a speed line there, like they do on pit road, make the speed coming into the box be X, give them five miles an hour,” Kevin Harvick continued. “However fast the pace car is, plus five miles an hour, draw a line across the race track and if you are faster than that with the length of the car it would be nose over the line from the restart zone, the computer can call the penalty at that precise moment.
“I’m all for leaving NASCAR out of it, but as a driver we know that. We know we put them in a very difficult position if you go half a car length before the restart zone at the end of the race, Denny Hamli knew that, he knows that, every driver in the field knows that. NASCAR doesn’t want to be in the position of having to make that decision. My opinion is: get out of that position to make that call. You have a speed coming into the box, so that’s what it is and it’s going to control itself at that point.
SO, what is the answer? Does this add an element of speed to the restart zone? Of the real solutions I’ve heard, this might be the best. Then again, automated arbitrage can also be frustrating.
So, after hearing this from Kevin Harvick, are you OK with tweaking the area in this way? Or is it just fine as it is and needs to be better judged?
