One of the more interesting elements of Sunday’s Ally 400 race at the Nashville Superspeedway was the enforcement of NASCAR’s rules centered around the rain delay that stopped the race midway through.
In particular, Austin Cindric was penalized for fan placement around his car and had to restart in the back.
In a butterfly-effect scenario, he would later wreck just before the end of the race, sending the race into overtime. It would go to a record five overtimes, with the field entirely scrambled from the leaderboard it had going into overtime.
“Certainly when the rain came and everybody got their stuff cooled back off it reset everything,” Denny Hamlin said on the Actions Detrimental with Denny Hamlin podcast. “Because usually the fall-off that we do see on these tires is because of heat. So any time we can cool them back off they’re going to fire right away.”
Drivers took different approaches on how to do that. Cindric’s was apparently over the line and drew a penalty from NASCAR.
But other drivers weren’t entirely clear on what was allowed and what wasn’t.
“We added water to my drink system and the guy was like, ‘Hey, if you want to do that, do it under caution,'” Hamlin said. “We were like, ‘We can’t.'”
Meanwhile, Tyler Reddick said that NASCAR officials told them it was no problem to replace bottles during the delay.
“That’s what I thought. I told him I was like, ‘Tell him it’s no different than handing me a water bottle in here. They’ve always allowed that,'” Hamlin said. “So was it just pointed down at the car the entire time? I wonder if you technically could be pointing it at tires to cool the car fully off, things like that.”
The lack of clarity from NASCAR made for a confusing situation for drivers.
Reddick pointed out that other cars on pit road had fans pointed at them. There didn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to what was allowed. Worse, there wasn’t consistency across the board.
“What we’re saying, though, is even our officials that were standing in our pit box had a different interpretation of the rules of the drink system,” Hamlin said. “So not everyone is on the same page there. So certainly it seemed where I guess [Cindric] had to go to the back for that.”
Ultimately, Cindric got tangled up in the back of the pack just before Hamlin was going to win the race by a reasonably comfortable margin. It triggered overtime, and Hamlin eventually ran out of fuel following the second overtime.
He was frustrated to see his day end in 12th place when he had come so close to securing the win not once, but twice.
“Listen, I don’t know. Am I crazy to think that like, I feel like I should have 100 wins?” Hamlin said. “Like this is f****** crazy the ways I’ve lost races. But d*****, it sucks, right?
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