NASCAR’s Track Limits Dilemma
Race winner William Byron, Michael McDowell, and others navigate the esses at COTA - Photo Credit: Sam Gardner/Getty Images (via: Racingnews.co)
Black is good, green is bad. It’s an adage in racing that means, stay on the pavement and you’ll be fine, get on the grass and you’ve done something wrong. Many racing series have made it pretty clear where the track limits are. In Formula 1, for example, if you place all four wheels on either side of the white lines, in corners, runoff areas, etc., you’re subject to a penalty. Your lap time is deleted in practice or qualifying. If it’s in the race you’re allowed 3 warnings before a time penalty is incurred, usually 5 seconds added to your race time. In NASCAR, the track limit lines are blurred. You have the obvious cases, the bus stop chicanes at Watkins Glen and the Charlotte Roval, where if you drive straight through you must come to a complete stop or serve a drive-through penalty. There’s the superspeedways, Daytona, Talladega, and Atlanta, where if you pass below the double line on the apron, you must give the position back. However, those penalties can be subjective as sometimes a driver is forced onto the apron and the penalty may be applied to the driver that pushed them down there. That brings us to what we saw at Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas this weekend. Track limits were a major story, and to be honest the rulings really didn’t make much sense.
COTA is a 3.426-mile circuit that was built to host Formula 1 and the US Grand Prix. The aforementioned track limit rules apply for F1, but when NASCAR came to the track 3 years ago they took a much more lenient approach. The only place where NASCAR elected to apply track limits was the turn 3-6, “esses” section. The paved run-off areas at turns 11, 12, 15, 19, and 20 are fair game. You’re allowed to cut inside any other corner around the circuit, all the way to the grass if you’d like. But if you find yourself beyond the green paint, on to the red white and blue, in the esses, it’s an automatic drive-through penalty. No stop and go here, you must take a trip through the pit lane at the specified speed limit. Do it on the last lap, like Shane Van Gisbergen did in Saturday’s Xfinity race, and it’s a 30 second time penalty. In SVG’s case this dropped him from 2nd to 27th in the final results. In total there were 37 of these penalties across the Xfinity (17), and Craftsman Truck (20) races on Saturday. In the Cup race the penalties cost the likes of Chase Elliott, John Hunter Nemechek, and Ricky Stenhouse Jr, valuable positions and points that were never made up as the race only had two cautions at the stage breaks. Mike Joy mentioned during the NASCAR on Fox broadcast that a sensor was embedded in the track. This sensor would record when drivers placed all 4 wheels beyond the track limits, and alert race control to the need for a drive-through penalty. But if that’s the case, why wasn’t Parker Kligerman penalized in the Xfinity race, when he drove onto the red, white, and blue area during the penultimate restart in the Xfinity race? There was no obvious indication that he was forced out there and he was not sent to the back of the field on the next restart, which is the penalty if a violation occurs immediately before a caution. So what’s the point of all of this? NASCAR really needs to take a look at how it enforces track limits at COTA.
Simply put, either have track limits, or don’t. If you’re going to enforce them in the esses, enforce them in every other corner on the track. This would certainly curtail a lot of the corner cutting, and generous use of run-off on corner exit we saw this weekend. This would likely have put a stop to the holes being dug on the inside of Turn 8 that left dirt all over the traditional racing line in that corner. Another solution would be to add curbs in the esses that would eliminate the advantage of driving beyond the white line by creating a physical deterrent. The curbs, similar to the “turtles” used in the Charlotte Roval chicanes, were used during NASCAR’s inaugural visit to COTA in 2021 but were removed when the series returned in 2022. Connor Zilisch appeared on the Door Bumper Clear Podcast and gave his thoughts on the use of turtles at COTA by other racing series. “Everytime that I’ve raced at COTA, we’ve had the turtles. So if you miss the esses there’s consequences. I don’t like how they just take the turtles away and just leave it to NASCAR’s discretion” was Zilisch’s response to a question by Brett Griffin on how to make the rules enforceable but also understandable. The final solution would be to keep the track limits rules as they are but change the penalty. The 30 second penalty for SVG was way too egregious for how minimal the advantage he gained was. Watching the broadcast, you cannot even tell if he crossed the green line. It’s an understandable penalty for a scenario like Ross Chastain’s cut through an access road at Indy in 2022, but not for dropping 4 wheels an inch too far to the left or right. NASCAR could look into the warning system Formula 1 uses to allow some leeway, and then tack on five seconds from there. You could even have the drivers serve the penalty as a stop and hold during their next pit stop, like in F1, rather than a drive-through that could effectively end a driver’s race. If there is no next pit stop the five seconds is added to their time at the end of the race. Having NASCAR compete at Grand Prix circuits like COTA is great and the racing is definitely thrilling, but any one of these changes would go a long way in improving the series’ biggest flaw, those pesky track limits.
