The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Sloppy race clouds NASCAR’s return to LA Coliseum
It was going to be impossible to duplicate the success this year — even with a Wiz Khalifa halftime set — but it wasn’t supposed to be so messy. The inaugural event had just five cautions; Sunday night was marred by 25 cautions and a long stretch after the seven-minute Wiz Khalifa set in which the drivers struggled to complete two consecutive laps under green.
The racing was so amateur that it probably killed any chance of turning a third trip to the Coliseum into a points-awarding race, which seemed plausible just a day earlier. Auto Club Speedway in nearby Fontana is set to be renovated following its Cup race later this month, and its track president said the facility wouldn’t be ready to host racing in 2024.
The absence of Auto Club next year puts pressure on NASCAR to remain in the Southern California market, and “a race that counts” at the Coliseum could have filled the void. But the drivers blasted that idea.
Martin Truex Jr., who went winless last season and nearly retired, won Sunday night and gave a flat “No,” when asked if the race should count in the future. The Clash was run at Daytona International Speedway from its 1979 inception until last year, when NASCAR moved it to the Coliseum because, frankly, a special race wasn’t so special anymore at Daytona.
The Coliseum idea was fresh and new, and it energized the industry for the start of an important season in which NASCAR launched a new car. The Clash at the Coliseum is what it is, Truex said, and if it’s messy and sloppy, so be it.
“Why would you want to screw it up and make it a points race? It’s like a oneoff deal,” he said, noting that at Daytona the everchanging eligibility rules made a boring race “all weird.”
“Now this is really cool. It’s got its own identity, fun race, all the way out here in a cool venue that’s got a lot of history,” Truex said of the Coliseum. “I think it’s kind of got a good vibe to it now. Let’s not maybe screw that up.”
But a secondary theme emerged at the Coliseum, as most drivers believed that an offseason fix NASCAR made to the rear bumper of its Next Gen car was not such a fix after all. The rear of the new car was designed to withstand hard hits, but the durability and rigidness of the rear clip left the driver absorbing far more energy than normal in routine crashes.
It led to at least two concussions, and Kurt Busch was forced to retire because of a July crash in qualifying. He said last week that he was in nine crashes in 2022 in which the force of impact alarmed Busch and he’s still not 100% healthy.
NASCAR made some fixes to soften the rear, but Wallace sounded the alarm early Sunday night when he was hit from behind.
“Uh NASCAR, rear bumper hits are still (expletive) awful,” he said on his radio.
Kyle Busch said Wallace’s rear bumper was visibly damaged, “so he might have been one of the ones that got hit the hardest.” He also agreed with Larson and Dillon, who said the violence inside the car “still doesn’t feel good.”
“Truthfully, it didn’t really feel much different at that speed and just the bumper car action that you get through the middle of the corner,” Kyle Busch said. “Like Austin said, when you get hit a few times, your head is getting jacked into the back of the headrest and you’re getting the whiplash effect. But (the lack of ) damage to the cars... like front and rear, underneath, you have no idea (it was a hard hit). But it’s still a brunt of a hit.”
Next up is the Daytona 500, where top speeds will be more than double the roughly 80-plus mph the drivers were doing at the Coliseum. And, the nature of the racing at Daytona typically requires one driver to slam into the back of the car in front of him to create the force needed to move through traffic.
But if the drivers are concerned, they didn’t go out of their way Sunday night to sound the alarm.
“I think the positive part is NASCAR has showed us things that they’re trying to do to help that area of the car,” Dillon said. “We’re making progress. That’s the biggest thing.”