NASCAR Disagrees With Fans and Richard Petty on Talladega and Questions What Needs to Be Fixed

Was Talladega a good race? According to the “Good Race Poll” by The Athletic’s Jeff Gluck, it was not. And it wasn’t even close.

Just 39% of the respondents said it was a good race. According to the veteran journalist, that number ranked as the lowest of 19 Talladega races in the poll. The previous low was 42% from the fall 2018 race. It was also the second-lowest of 45 superspeedway races in the poll. Only the 2019 Clash at Daytona was lower at 20.9%.

Richard Petty agreed with the majority opinion’s view of Talladega.

“So they worked hard at doing what they done, but they couldn’t do nothing,” Petty said on his Petty Racing Family YouTube channel. “It looked like a pace lap every time. You know what I mean? The guys out there, they thought they was racing and they was racing, but there was no place for ’em to race.

“And to me, it wasn’t a race. It was just a happening. And they happened to throw the green flag and somebody — and they throw the checkered flag and the No. 2 car won the race and he just happened to be in front at that time.”

During NASCAR Senior Vice President of Competition Elton Sawyer’s Tuesday appearance on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, his remarks didn’t line up with the feelings of Petty and the majority of fans.

“First of all, when you’re sitting in race control — and Mike can allude to this because MRN’s right next door to us — and we’re standing up and you’re watching, and our fans are standing on their feet,” Sawyer said, describing the scene at the 2.66-mile track. “We’re four-wide, some cases we’re five-wide, they’re back to single file. Our fans are standing up, they’re cheering. So it’s like, OK.

“And then you go look at the metrics and you look at the stats after the race, and you have 67 lead changes among 23 different drivers. So, when we look at all of that, it’s like, what are we trying to fix? What’s not going the way we would like it?

“Now, I get it when we start talking about short-track packages when we have a guy that leads 400 some laps of a 500-lap race. OK, we can do our best to try to get to work on that, figure out what we can do. But when you have 67 lead changes among 23 different drivers, I’m not real sure what we’re gonna work on there.

“But as always, we want to get better. So we want to have 70 lead changes. We want to have 25 or 30 different drivers that lead races. But the short answer is we’re always looking at our product — whether it’s superspeedway, road course, intermediate, short track — we’re always looking at it trying to make it better.” 

The next superspeedway race is August at Daytona. Despite what fans and Petty think, it doesn’t sound like anything is going to change.

Related: Richard Petty Calls Out Fox’s Coverage and Says What Fans Have Been Saying for Years

Read the full article here