Brad Moran, NASCAR’s managing director for the Cup Series, detailed the thought process behind race control not calling for a caution for a crash involving Cody Ware that left a significant dent in the Turn 7 railing.
Ware was able to keep the car under power, drove down pit road, and attempted repairs but the Rick Ware Racing No. 51 ultimately chose to park it afterwards. This became a talking point after the race because television only showed that Ware had damage, but offered no replays of what happened.
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After the race, in-car replays showed the severity of the impact, and how perilously close Ware came to careening off the railing and back into oncoming traffic. Moran said, based on the information they had, they were not going to throw a caution unless the No. 51 began dropping debris since it did drive away from the scene of the incident.
“We never stop working on safety,” Moran said on Wednesday during his weekly appearance on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. “When we get an incident like this, we go back and take and look and see what can change or what can be done differently.
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“Just to give you a view from the tower, the 51 wrecked out of 6 there, and at that point, NASCAR, we have a corner worker in Turn 1 and one through the esses, one at the bus stop and one in Turn 6 with our official radios and the track has all their local corner workers on a different radio with their official, who is in the tower as well.
“When that incident happens, or anytime there’s debris, we have a local ‘blue’ during the time it’s happening. The 51 made significant contact and stopped near the tire pack at the restart zone. He did drive away within seconds so the caution did not come out. We weren’t going to throw it at that point unless debris came off the car.”
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NASCAR does have emerging technologies coming that would eventually be able to send a signal to race control any time a significant impact is triggered.
“Yeah, we are working with our safety team and the new ECU going in the car this weekend for the first time, and it has a lot of different options, and we’re looking at the solution where we can use our iDash system which is an incident recording device in the car, possibly signaling to the tower the significance of a hit, which would be useful to us if we had that tool,” Moran said. “The ECU has not been in the car for a race yet … so we have our safety team, which is the best in the business, and they are working on a possible solution to get us more information with the new technology.”
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