NASCAR official defends policy that eliminated Ryan Blaney from Watkins Glen

Cup Series managing director Brad Moran was the featured guest on Tuesday during the weekly SiriusXM NASCAR Radio official’s segment where he fielded question about the changes to Watkins Glen International and the policy that ended the race for Ryan Blaney.

He was also asked how the sanctioning body viewed the aggressively soft tire that Goodyear brought this weekend , one that fell off early but less and less as the race wore on, including a 40 lap stint from Ross Chastain and Shane Van Gisbergen that allowed them to retain the lead.

Initial testing showed a six second falloff over a run, then three seconds for the Wheel Force Car test the week before the race and the latter is what proved true until the track rubbered-up in the second half of the race.

“Yeah, there were all sorts of numbers getting thrown around,” Moran said. “We were expecting a big drop off, which was about three seconds. We got to that two to three second drop off and it changed the race. There was good strategy throughout the entire day. All the competitors really liked the tire and liked the direction we are going. The tire was an absolute home run for Goodyear so good job for them. They’ve been working hard all year to come up with new tires … hats off to them, brought a great tire and put on a good show with it.”

Track changes

Drivers reported concussive blows for the race at Watkins Glen last year, mostly from how the NextGen car traversed the bus stop chicane, forcing NASCAR to eliminate the curbs.

Specifically last year, 1,000 impact events were recorded in that section of the track, an eye popping number because these were from drivers who didn’t crash, and there were about 3,400 impact events all season.

In other words, the car bounced over the curb so hard that it was effectively rattling drivers, who all complained of headaches the next day after that race.

Moran said drivers reacted positively to the changes.

“Yeah, the bus stop got everyone’s thumbs up from the drivers, they were getting in the Cup car, these things are so rigid the way they got them set up and they were really crashing around through that bus stop and now, it is faster going through there, but it’s way better on the drivers, so that was an absolute plus.”

Rumble strips, not unlike those found on the interstate, were also added past Turns 1 and 5 to keep drivers on the racing surface, which produced mixed results.

“The recessed rumble strips is an experiment we wanted to try. We believe it worked very good in Turn 1,” Moran said. “It didn’t really do much out of 5 which we didn’t expect it to quite as much. If they went off into 1, I think they stayed off it due to a combination of the tires, the recessed rumble strips because they would see more tire wear and that’s why we didn’t see near as many people going out there. I would say we have a little work to do there but we learned a lot.

“It was a big driver initiative. They didn’t like running all the way out to the wall out there. It made it quite hairy coming through the esses and in the past we’ve seen some big wrecks with the speed you carry through there. It was to keep them more on the race track. There’s still a lot of passing, we saw a lot of three and four wide going through there, so when it’s clean out there and they can get good grip, it was getting a little bit overboard from a driver perspective.”

Blaney’s DVP gripe

Ryan Blaney was eliminated from the race after the first lap crash when Corey Lajoie connected with Kyle Busch and collected Blaney but also Denny Hamlin.

Blaney couldn’t drive the car back to pit road, and was towed, eliminating him from the race. The defending champion was adamant that it could have been fixed on pit road but the regulations do not permit that opportunity.

“We have our DVP, the damaged vehicle policy, which has been in play since 2017,” Moran said. “There was a lot of industry collaboration from teams and owners, to reduce the number of people they bring to the track, because back in the day, they’d bring a car in and cut it in half and weld parts on and put them together and they weren’t really comfortable with what they were sending the drivers out in. The drivers weren’t totally comfortable with what they were driving and that’s why this was put into place. That was 2017 and it hasn’t changed.”

Moran is referring to the crash carts teams use to bring to the track.

“If you are in an incident and you are on the DVP and you cannot drive the vehicle back to your pit stall, then you are out of the race at that point,” Moran said. “If you drive it into the garage or behind the wall, at that point you’re out of the race. And you have to go to the care center.

“So, it’s a variety of reasons or efficiencies or safety. But all the industry in collaboration put this together in 2017. It was very unfortunate. I totally get Blaney’s frustration. But he was involved with the incident with [Brad Keselowski] which did end up busting the front suspension or steering I believe it was at the end of it all.

And that would be consistent with what we’ve been doing since 2017.”

Blaney said NASCAR allows cars to be towed back to pit road with flat tires and sent back out on track but Moran said that is a completely different rule and policy.

“To add to that, in 2022 when we got this new car and went to Auto Club, I think it was race three of the season, we found we had a situation we had to deal with in the design of the new car and the design of the tire and shorter sidewall of the tire and all these items with the new car, they would get beeched and it would prevent them from moving,” Moran said. “They could be perfectly fine, have four flat tires, and couldn’t move so we needed to come up with a procedure for that which we did and that was called the flat tire recovery program, which is not the same thing as the damaged vehicle policy … We bring them in to change the tires and continue because the last thing we want is to put a car out of the race for just flat tires.”

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