During Friday’s Cup series session at Las Vegas Motor Speedway,
there were some close calls on the track with cars running at full speed to
post fast laps nearly missing cars running off the pace while attempting to
cool their engines between runs.
Driver Brian Vickers, who won the first of three rounds, called
the session “the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done in a race car.”
Friday’s session was just the first on a superspeedway
and first using the three-round format.
“As we discussed with
the teams in the offseason, we expected to use the first few weeks of the
season to get a good snapshot of how things went and how things played out on
various size race tracks,” said NASCAR spokesman Kerry Tharp. “We’re still in
that process.
“However, the new
format has been deemed a success almost universally by the competitors,
promoters and fans and that is a very positive development for the sport. We’re
getting great feedback and ideas from the garage and if we can tweak it to make
it even better moving forward we will.”
Teams have the
ability to address the problem now, if they elected to remove tape from their
front grille areas. But unless every team decided to do so, some teams would
have an advantage over others.
When NASCAR first
announced the new qualifying procedures it was not going to allow teams to make
any changes to the cars during the sessions. It was only upon receiving
feedback from teams NASCAR elected to allow some changes to be made.
