The opening Stage of last Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series YellaWood 500 at Talladega Superspeedway was seen as a farce, as far as racing is concerned. Instead of attempting to push to lead the race, every driver and team in the opening Stage of the race was committed to fuel saving.
How bad did things get? Well, according to Carson Hocevar, he and Bubba Wallace were able to partake in a game of rock, paper, scissors during the green-flag “action” in the race.
“We’re driving 150 miles per hour, going super slow, compared to 2000 horsepower. All of a sudden, in front of me is Bubba Wallace’s car, and he starts [putting his hand out the window]. I was like, ‘What is he doing?’ He was telling me, ‘Let’s play rock, paper, scissors,” Hocevar explained during a live stream.
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Hocevar continued, “So all of a sudden, he started doing it. I threw paper, he threw scissors. And so, I texted him after, and I was like, ‘Hey, by the way, I lost rock, paper, scissors. I threw paper, you threw scissors,’ and he sent me, dying laughing; he’s like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe you saw that.’ He’s like, ‘You did see it.’ So, yeah, we were literally playing rock, paper, scissors down the frontstretch, and it was into Turn 1.”
If the ultra-slow speeds of the opening Stage of last Sunday’s race weren’t already enough to anger race fans, who want to see drivers battling hard all race long, just know, cruising around Talladega Superspeedway at nearly 30 miles per hour slower than qualifying speeds is easy enough that drivers can play games with their hands out the window while doing it.
As speeds continually crept lower and lower, the pack had gotten down to 159 mph average speeds. To put that in perspective, Chase Briscoe, who didn’t have the draft to assist his speed in single-car qualifying, took the pole position with a 186.065 mph average speed.
Thankfully, as the pack slowed to a crawl, the three RFK Racing drivers, Brad Keselowski, Chris Buescher, and Ryan Preece, and their teams decided they had seen enough and chose to break away from the field. The end result was an easy sweep of the top-three positions in the opening Stage of the race for the RFK Racing trio.
While the RFK Racing strategy gave us something to at least catch our attention in Stage 1 of the YellaWood 500, the Stage was overly boring. Seeing drivers run around a 2.66-mile superspeedway at quarter-throttle is possibly less exciting than watching paint dry.
After seeing how the RFK Racing drivers were able to pull away, and how hard they were for the pack to try to chase down, that will hopefully put an end to the silly fuel-saving games at Talladega going forward.
But even if it doesn’t, expect next time to not be nearly as drastic.
On this week’s Hauler Talk Podcast, NASCAR’s Mike Forde explained that teams were warned as the average speeds dropped to 159 mph, they were breaking the minimum speed rule and that, if it continued, the sanctioning body was going to black-flag everyone in violation.
Speeds picked up above the minimum speed and didn’t drop below it for the remainder of the race.
