The NASCAR Truck driver, Hailie Deegan, had a rather controversial NASCAR opinion which she shared via her tweet. According to her, there should be a reduced number of races, as opposed to the usual 36-race calendar. She even said that people don’t have the patience to spend four hours watching one single race. Recently, Cup Series driver Kevin Harvick spoke about this issue.
He said, “Outside the Coke 600, I think that one’s probably a debate as well. The thing that people have to realize, there’s going to be a lot more cautions. Its not the racing that we’ve had for the past several years with a limited amount of cautions. There’s going to be a ton of cautions, as we’ve seen through all these races. From a driver’s standpoint, I don’t think any of us want to race 500 mile races anyway.”
He cited the example of the Atlanta Motor Speedway and running that race with a restrictor plate. According to the Stewart-Haas Racing driver, it was a very long race for him. Of course, races like the Daytona 500 need to be 500 miles, and an argument can be made for the Coke 600. However, the same cannot be said for the rest of the races on the Cup Series calendar.
Harvick also insisted that there should be no stages on most of these tracks. Instead, a stage point should be given during the road course events. However, the main thing is that there should be no arbitrary cautions thrown. The former Cup Series champion admitted that at a track like Circuit of The Americas, the cautions take way too long.
On the ovals, the stage system is fine, but the road course events are a different story. Such a situation takes strategy out of the teams’ hands, just so that they can mix up the race. At the end of the day, the road courses need to try to implement stages in such a way that it does not adversely affect strategy.
