TALLADEGA, Ala. — The week leading up to the NASCAR Playoffs weekend at Talladega Superspeedway was a story in itself.
A week after Hurricane Helene swept through the southeastern United States, NASCAR, its teams, its tracks, and various other industry members offered aid to people impacted by the natural disaster.
Former Cup Series driver Greg Biffle was at the forefront of helping. He helicoptered to towns destroyed by the storm and used social media to get others involved, too.
Biffle made his Venmo account available so people could donate to the relief effort. He also listed a North Carolina Strong T-shirt on his website for sale and pledged that all the proceeds would go towards the hurricane’s victims.
But aside from Biffle’s individual efforts, the entire NASCAR industry contributed to gathering supplies and aiding people across the Southeast.
NASCAR even made Talladega a drop-off location during the race weekend to allow fans to donate water, diapers, wipes, and nonperishable food. NASCAR also said its foundation is accepting financial contributions to support the American Red Cross as it helps people throughout the Carolinas, Virginia, and all the other places damaged by the disaster.
And while all this positivity was coming from the industry about its charitable efforts and financial relief, a big, ugly headline reared its head when 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports announced that it jointly filed a lawsuit against NASCAR.
This new lawsuit could be the climax of the negotiations that have been happening for two years. In a nutshell, here’s what’s happened:
All but two NASCAR Cup teams signed the sanctioning body’s new charter proposal. The two teams that didn’t sign are the ones suing NASCAR and its CEO, Jim France. 23XI and Front Row are accusing NASCAR of taking financial advantage of teams who, in their eyes, have made stock car racing as popular as it is today.
23XI, co-owned by Denny Hamlin and NBA legend Michael Jordan, have publicly expressed their opinion that the teams are not getting a large enough share of the revenue in NASCAR’s proposed charter deal. Several teams have echoed this sentiment, including Jeff Gordon, who said several months ago on Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s podcast that he doesn’t think Hendrick Motorsports has made a profit as a top-tier NASCAR Cup team in a decade.
NASCAR has repeatedly declined to comment on the charter negotiations, including Sunday, when several reporters approached France in the garage and only said he wished to have an exciting playoff race.
The race itself started off impressively, with four-by-four racing for sustained periods of time in the opening stage. Three-wide racing is typical and dicey enough, as it can cause crashes involving dozens of cars. But for four-wide to happen without chaos ensuing is a testament to the drivers’ abilities to concentrate and not make any errors, as one little hiccup could wipe out over half the field.
A previous notable time that a Cup Series field was four-wide for several rows was the October 2012 Talladega race. That ended with an enormous crash on the final lap and a Matt Kenseth win.
But the 2012 race had four-wide in the closing laps, so that’s a more expected time for such tight racing to happen. Sunday’s race had four-wide before Lap 60, which had drivers feeling anxious way earlier than they were prepared for.
“That was way more intense than Stage 1 should be,” Kyle Larson told his team over the radio during the second caution.
Talladega is notorious for its big, spectacular crashes, but equally so when it comes to single-file racing, too. That never really happened for more than a few laps, and when it did, it was typically during green-flag pit cycles.
Hamlin has become known for his strategy of backing away from the pack when he thinks the racing is getting too aggressive. He stayed near the back of the field for most of the Atlanta race several weeks ago, resulting in a 24th-place finish to his detriment.
Using a similar strategy on Sunday worked in his favor. He finished 10th and is 30 points above the Round of 8 cutoff with one race remaining in the Round of 12 after a wreck of about two dozen cars occurred with less than five laps to go.
“Since I was 1.5 miles away from the wreck when it happened, I knew I was safe from getting in it,” he said. “… today, I feel very fortunate to be on the good end of missing it.”
“We saw two or three-wide racing through most of the day today, it’s so interesting because of the fuel mileage that comes into play,” he said. “You have half the field playing fuel mileage and half the field that’s not. It actually creates a better race than you would normally see.”
But when pack racing becomes four-wide, strategy is eliminated, and drivers can’t do anything but ride the storm.
“There’s just nowhere to go. You’d like to [drop back], but track position is too important,” he said. “If you back out, how are you going to get back up there? There’s just nowhere to go when you try to make a move to the front. It just gets jammed.”
When “The Big One” finally happened and drivers were trying to get their cars back to pit road, many teams had confusion about what NASCAR was telling drivers to do. The Damaged Vehicle Policy NASCAR implemented eight years ago was designed to keep cars that weren’t capable of running at or near the pace of the rest of the field off the track, but some drivers felt that wasn’t the case on Sunday.
In NASCAR’s defense, this was the biggest crash in its history, and the track workers and safety crews had a tremendous workload to clean up and organize everything.
Josh Berry was livid with the situation because, at Kansas Speedway last week, NASCAR made him go to the infield after he spun. He had minimal body damage but four flat tires. After a lap of racing, he got towed back into the garage while still in the car.
On Sunday, Berry, who was involved in “The Big One,” criticized race control for allowing cars in similar situations to stay on the track.
“Fuckin’ 42 car (John Hunter Nemechek) was over there doing burnouts, slinging rubber all over the safety workers, trying to get going,” Berry said. “But if you have four flat tires and you got to get towed to pit road, you’re done, right?”
NASCAR senior VP of competition Elton Sawyer conceded that last week, Berry probably should have been able to continue his race. He also acknowledged that race control had difficult choices to make when it came to deciding which cars were healthy enough to continue to the end.
“We had a situation in Turn 3 where we’ve got 25-plus cars down there,” Sawyer said. “We’re not sure why they can’t continue. We don’t know if it’s strictly because they’re just in the grass; they’re high-sided. For us to make a determination that they’ve got some suspension damage and can’t continue, that puts a lot on us — we want to err on the side of the competitors.”
Sawyer also said the Damaged Vehicle Policy will be reviewed in the offseason. He understood the frustration from various teams about the rule’s lack of clarity, and obviously, NASCAR doesn’t want any more inconsistency about how the rule is interpreted.
On Sunday night, Hamlin was reviewing topics to discuss for his “Actions Detrimental” podcast. Between the collective effort from NASCAR’s community to help those affected by Helene, the antitrust lawsuit he filed, the confusion about the Damaged Vehicle Policy, the race, and his strategic top-10 finish, he posted on X (formerly Twitter) something race fans and industry personnel could probably all agree on:
“Looking at the topics for tomorrow, Im at a loss, where do we even start?”
