Driving angry
Lack of etiquette makes nasCar playoffs dicey
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Tensions are high at every level of NASCAR as its grueling schedule, which stretches from mid-February to early November, enters the home stretch with three weeks remaining to crown three series champions.
All eyes had been on feuding drivers Chase Elliott and Kevin Harvick, but last week NASCAR demanded they knock it off — a directive that sucked all the drama out of what could have been a nail-biting rivalry capable of derailing Elliott’s shot at a second consecutive Cup Series title.
Still, there’s been enough bumping and banging through the field in all three national series that terms such as “driver code” and “etiquette” hang heavy over the championship battles.
Should drivers who didn’t qualify for or have been eliminated from the playoff field literally move out of the way of title contenders? Are drivers taking too many risks trying to make it to the championship round? Both are viable questions based on the racing of late.
Chase Briscoe and Denny Hamlin have twice tangled on tracks this season, and contact during last Sunday’s Cup Series race at Texas Motor Speedway led to a heated back-and-forth exchange between the drivers on Instagram.
Tyler Reddick apologized to William Byron earlier this month at Charlotte Motor Speedway, where they had an on-track incident and Byron was ultimately eliminated from the playoffs. Byron admitted he was “at a full rage” — and Reddick, who competes for Richard Childress Racing, assured him he understood the stakes for the Hendrick Motorsports driver that day.
Just a week earlier at Talladega Superspeedway, 21-year-old Tate Fogelman wrecked Truck Series championship favorite John Hunter Nemechek to win a NASCAR national series race for the first time. Fogelman said “the seas parted” and created a hole for him to make the winning pass, a take hotly contested by Kyle Busch, who owns the 24-yearold Nemechek’s team.
“I did not see it that way, I saw him hit the apron and turn right,” said Busch, a fulltime Cup Series driver for Joe Gibbs Racing who this season continued to enter events in the second-tier Xfinity Series and third-tier Truck Series.
“It’s pathetic what we’re doing these days,” said Busch, who in his third decade of NASCAR has won two Cup Series titles (2015, 2019) and was the second-tier circuit’s 2009 season champion. “Nobody has any self-respect, respect for equipment, nothing. Cup (drivers) are guilty of it, too.”
How does that get fixed? “Unlearn everything you’ve learned about safety and get people hurt,” said Busch, who added “there’s no question” the problem is generational and younger drivers race as if they are invincible.
“I wouldn’t say I’m scared, but it’s like you’re kind of leery going into all these (superspeedway) races, just being able to walk out afterwards,” added Busch, 36, who broke both his legs in a February 2015 crash at Daytona International Speedway.
Hamlin, one of his JGR teammates, has basically had enough and made that clear in his testy online exchange with Briscoe. Hamlin, 40, scolded Briscoe, 26, for racing championship contenders too hard, to which the Stewart-Haas Racing driver wrote back: “I get paid to race, just because you guys are racing in the playoffs doesn’t mean I’m just gonna wave you by.”
Hamlin responded by explaining on-track patience can yield better results.
“Risk management is how you optimize your finish each week,” he wrote. “Maybe putting yourself in others shoes for 1 min would help. You had 25 races to get a chance to race for the post season. Respect is a underrated trait in today’s world it appears.”
Both of the top two national series are at Kansas Speedway this weekend for the middle race of the third round of the playoffs, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. Cup Series regular-season champion Kyle Larson is the only driver in any of the three national series with a spot locked up in a title-deciding finale on the first weekend of November at Phoenix Raceway. All four championship-contending slots in the Xfinity Series are still open, and the same is true for the Truck Series, which doesn’t race again until next weekend at Martinsville Speedway.
After that, all three series will have trimmed their playoff fields from eight drivers to four.
Hamlin doesn’t expect much on-track courtesy from drivers who are out of the title chases.
“I think we have seen in our sport that there is no code,” Hamlin said. “I just don’t understand the mentality of some of these guys.”
Elliott, who goes to Kansas below the cutline, believes NASCAR’s playoff format “certainly extracts some desperation at times.”
His own spat with Harvick began quietly in September at Darlington Raceway, where Elliott said the SHR driver gave him a flat tire. When it happened again two weeks later at Bristol Motor Speedway, Elliott deliberately held Harvick up to cost him the win. Then Harvick intentionally wrecked Elliott on the Roval course at Charlotte, only to wreck himself out of the playoffs later in the same race when he crashed into a wall as the Hendrick Motorsports driver closed in.
It’s another generation gap feud, with Elliott 25 and Harvick 20 years his senior, but this one is between drivers who are on equal footing in their number of Cup Series titles. Harvick won his championship in 2014 and has been among the final four drivers four times since then, but he is winless this season and failed to reach postseason’s round of eight for the first time since the current format was introduced seven years ago.
Elliott noted drivers have to be aggressive to advance through the playoffs, but he also said personal feelings are a factor.
“When two drivers mutually respect one another, I feel like you get along and you race each other with respect, and if you have a run-in, typically you have a conversation about it and go on down the road,” Elliott said. “When there might be a lack of respect, or people don’t see eye to eye, that to me is probably where your problems come from more so than the quote-unquote code.
“It’s just more of a respect thing and understanding where the other person’s coming from.”