RELATED: Cut tire puts Logano in a hole
How did a sunny Saturday in Texas lead to an hours-long weather delay that wiped out all but the NASCAR XFINITY Series race? That was one of the questions posed to NASCAR Executive Vice President and Chief Racing Development Officer Steve O'Donnell on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio on Tuesday morning.
"It was unique and was certainly frustrating," O'Donnell said of the situation, which was hampered by early morning showers and unusually heavy rain in Texas throughout October. "It's really hard where you have an environment where, you know, it's not raining, the fans look at it and say 'What's going on here?' "
The main culprits in the delays were weepers, small cuts in the track where water pours out and streams across the racing surface. The weepers caused difficulties drying the track because, when the sun finally did come out, the heat helped pull the water up and out and compounded the problem, O'Donnell explained.
Two Sprint Cup practices and XFINITY qualifying were canceled due to the delays, and the absence of the Cup practices, O'Donnell said, carried over into Sunday's AAA Texas 500. Tire issues, first involving Joey Logano, whose left-rear shredded on Lap 10, put teams in a precarious guessing game early in the race.
"I think Dale (Earnhardt) Jr. probably summed it up best in terms of talking about the lack of that last practice, (where) a lot of times teams really dial in the tire pressures," O'Donnell said. "Some would go perhaps too far, and you saw some of that happen early in Sunday's race. You didn't see that later in the race."
Defending Sprint Cup champion Kevin Harvick also experienced tire trouble early in the race, but crew chief Rodney Childers claimed it was debris that caused it, as heard on the in-race driver-crew chief audio.
"I think there were one or two where it was debris on the track, and that happens," O'Donnell said. "We do everything we can to make sure there's nothing on the race track."
Logano's tire failure and subsequent damage to the No. 22 Team Penske Ford led to him going to the garage and finishing 40th. He is eighth in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series standings, 63 points below the cutoff line, heading into Phoenix.
Facing a must-win situation at Phoenix in order to advance to the Championship 4, Logano's team won't have much time to dwell on the Texas result, but one wonders whether a final practice Saturday evening would have made a difference.
"That was a lot of discussion in the garage area ... we talked to the drivers, the crew chiefs," O'Donnell said about the decision to not hold a final Sprint Cup practice after the XFINITY Series race. "There's a lot on the line and we certainly want to make every effort to get practice in, but after having those discussions, the teams felt like they were ready to start setting up the cars for the race and preparing for Sunday."