JOLIET, Ill. — NASCAR beefed up its policing of the restart zone this weekend at Chicagoland Speedway, but just how much help the addition of a high-definition camera manned by a “senior NASCAR official” provided remained open for debate following Sunday’s myAFibRisk.com 400 at Chicagoland Speedway.
A restart on Lap 145 saw second-place Jeff Gordon (Hendrick Motorsports) wrest the lead away from Kyle Busch (Joe Gibbs Racing), and left the JGR group feeling as if they had been snookered.
Gordon saw it differently, saying afterward that it wasn’t about beating Busch, but that “it was about the guys behind me.”
“I started to roll a little bit and he decided not to go,” Gordon said. “When we got to the second set of hash marks (indicating the end of the zone), I just went, knowing that’s the rule.
“I don’t know if he spun the tires or what happened there. It seemed like he was trying to get a penalty put to me by not going.
“He didn’t go. The guy in second … the whole thing is just a mess because the box is too small. All I’m trying to do is not get beat from behind. If we roll up there slow, everybody else just hangs way back, gets huge momentum and then they take you three wide and you’re either wrecked or you’re going back 8-10 spots.”
NASCAR officials notified teams via radio that the restart “was under review” and later said the review had been completed. No action was taken.
Sprint Cup Series Managing Director Richard Buck said that overall, “I thought everybody did a good job (on the restarts) and it kept getting better and better.”
The Gordon incident, he said, “was close, and all of our resources, especially our new resources that we were able to pull in, that helped us make the decision. We’re happy about the decision, confident.”
Several laps were run between the time officials announced that the restart was under review and the decision that no action was warranted.
“The most important thing for us is to get it right and be consistent,” Buck said. “And we hear that loud and clear and that’s our goal. So we will take whatever measures necessary to make sure we get it right.
“But part of this process of letting the … competition know, they know now it’s under review. So that gives us the opportunity to really look at it and make the right decision on the call.”
This weekend’s Camping World Truck, XFINITY and Sprint Cup events at Chicagoland used the HD camera manned by an official on the ground to monitor restarts.
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