I am kind of suprised that there isn’t a thread on this already.
NASCAR totally robbed Kurt Busch of a probable win and a good chance of making the top 10 in points. Kurt owned everybody yesterday in the Busch race.
For those who missed it, Kurt was on the entrance to the pits when a yellow flag came out. He was, IMHO, already commited to pit road and had no chance of pulling back on the track. The asshats of NASCAR ruled that he did not make pit road before the yellow flag came out and pushed him back to the last car on the lead lap.
The NASCAR officials said that Busch should have pulled out and not entered the pits.
Now, I can understand trying to stop people from cheating but this is silly. It is silly, because from the replays I watched, if Busch had tried to pull back on the track he would have had to a) completely stop the car b) reverse back to the track. Or he could have done a drive through. The thing is it was so close in real time that it was hard to tell that he wasn’t at the line when the yellow came out. Busch had two choices, he could have done a drive through and lost positions or he could stop. He stopped and got screwed. Also, this was his normal lap to pit according to everything I’ve read, he wasn’t trying to sneak in due to an accident. He was simply pitting like normal until a yellow came out at t bad time and NASCAR made a very bad call.
I usually don’t care about this kind of stuff all that much but this really pissed me off. NASCAR totally screwed Busch for something that was totally out of his control. It was a very bad call.
The call they made was to keep them out of the gray. The rule says “you cannot pass this line after this point in time”. Well, he did, but only by a fraction of a second. If they let him slide, then there is a precedence for others to be just a bit over the line (so to speak) in other rules and get away with it. And from the all the specific car body and engine specs they have to enforce, I don’t think “that’s close enough” ever comes up.
They’re getting bad with a lot of these rules. Last week, in Cup, they should have thrown the yellow on the last lap, but didn’t. That screwed Kasey Kahne. I understand that they wanted to allow them to race to the stripe, but the wreck had cars checking up and wrecking.
Bad rules. Inconsistent rules. Badly applied rules.
And next year, changed rules. Any conjecture as to what they’re going to change?
Well, it isn’t apparently that simple. According to The Sporting News, NASCAR said that if Busch had stopped his car over the line(#1) and backed up, he would have been penalized. If he did a drive through he would have been penalized. If he stopped, which he did, he would have been penalized. Cite.
So, no matter what Busch did in that situation he would have been penalized. The only way he would not have been penalized is if he didn’t try and pit. The only way for him to know that he couldn’t pit would be if he (or his crew chief) knew in advance that the yellow was going to come out. Since, presumably, they are not capable of predicting the future, there is nothing they could have done that would have not caused a penalty.
There is something wrong when a racer is put in a position where, purely by bad luck (and not his own bad luck), no matter what he does he is breaking a rule.
Slee
#1. According to NASCAR Busch had 200 feet to stop. According to physics, a normal car traveling at 35 MPH will stop in 210 feet. While the car Busch is drving certainly has better brakes than a normal car it I find it really hard to believe that a driver could see the red light, react, slam on the brakes and stop without crossing the line when he is not expecting the red light to come out.
Bull he had 200 feet. The open/closed light precedes the commitment cone, and Kurt was past the light when it went red. In fact, he was about 18 inches from the line when it went red. Had he tried to turn out, he’d have wiped out the water barriers AND still gotten tagged for a commitment cone violation.
Before next year, the pit road rules need to be changed so that a car within 50 feet of the line when the caution comes out is considered to be on pit road, because that was ridiculous. Almost as ridiculous as the rules for the Inner Loop were.
Don’t know where you got your numbers, but you would be right from oh say 85 MPH. A good street car can from 60-0 is about 120 feet. Or less
::: reads link:::
OK, 210 feet includes a very long reaction time. 120 is for the car alone. .75 seconds would kill a race driver.
::: Goes over to Google and converts 35 mph to FPS:::
35 MPH = 51.3 feet/second
Humm 120 + .75(51) = 159 feet or so. Me thinks the California DMV was using a car with no brakes to get that 210 foot number as it does not hold up.