NASCAR executive Steve O’Donnell gives perspective behind trio of incidents
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From a car’s tire bursting into flames, to a question of whether or not oil was on the surface of New Hampshire Motor Speedway to drivers tossing empty water bottles onto the track, there were plenty of talking points one day after the 5-hour ENERGY 301.
NASCAR Executive Vice President and Chief Racing Development Officer Steve O’Donnell addressed them all with NASCAR.com, specifically noting that the discarded water bottles is something the sanctioning body will address with drivers.
“It’s never something we like to see,” O’Donnell said one day after the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race in which two different cautions were thrown for debris that ended up being discarded water bottles. “If we can avoid a caution, we want to do that. In this situation, we weren’t sure in terms of what was on the track and were not exactly able to spot who did it, so it’s something we’ll address with the competitors going forward. We’ve had to do that in the past.”
The second incident led to NBC analyst Jeff Burton suggesting that water bottles have numbers corresponding to the car number of the driver, making it easy to identify the culprit — which led to a humorous tweet from Ray Evernham.
Hey @JeffBurton we used put your # on our water bottle Lol. Enjoying the broad cast
— ray evernham (@RayEvernham) July 19, 2015
“We do that with some of the parts on the car. I saw Ray Evernham said ‘I’ll just put Jeff Burton‘s old number on the water bottle,’ ” O’Donnell said. “That is something we’ve got to make sure we have video of instances in any case. I’ve said often we’ve got the smartest folks in the business, so you’ve always got to make sure what’s out there and what car it came from.”
More from O’Donnell:
• On the length of time it took the safety crew to reach Alex Bowman, whose car was on fire: “It’s a balance. Certainly we want to get to any competitor as quickly as we can, but in any situation we’ve got to monitor what’s going on on the race track and enable ourselves to get the cars slowed down as quickly as possible to dispatch the emergency equipment.
“In that case, it took a little longer for us to get that opportunity for the safety equipment to get out to Alex, but that’s certainly something we focus on each and every weekend, and where we can improve, we’ll continue to do so. Our folks train for that every day, all year round and we want to keep the drivers in the most safe position as we can each and every race.”
• On not throwing a caution when some drivers reported oil on the track: “We’re always going to err on the side of safety, first and foremost. We’ve got track spotters around the track in each corner. We’re monitoring the drivers and their spotters on the radio, so a lot of it will depend first and foremost, we’re going to check with our officials — do they see anything, have they relayed anything to us? If they have in the case of oil, most likely we’re going to throw the caution and err on the side of safety.
“We’ve also got to look at what time it is during the race — are competitors looking for a caution, is it within a pit window? From time to time, folks will call up saying there’s potential debris on the track and we can’t confirm that with our corner spotters so we’re going to rely on our officials. We certainly take the input from the drivers, especially when it comes to oil. And once we receive the message from our officials in the turns saying that there is potential oil on the race track, that’s when we’ll throw the caution.”