The recent caution controversy at Martinsville has taken over NASCAR. While Denny Hamlin has reason to cry foul after a win slipped through his grasp, Dale Earnhardt Jr. is not happy either.
During Sunday’s Cook Out 400, five cautions stacked up to 54 laps, turning the race into a stop-start affair.
One of these cautions, for debris from Ty Dillon’s brake rotor, opened the door for Chase Elliott to edge past Denny Hamlin, who had controlled the entirety of the race so far, and score his and Chevrolet’s first win of the season.
While it’s often hard to get NASCAR drivers to agree, after this past weekend’s race, many are pointing to the length of these cautions as a real problem.
Before the late race caution, a caution with two laps left in Stage 1 did not resume green-flag racing until 18 laps into Stage 2, eating into race time. This was not only the case for the Cup Series, as the same story played out across the weekend and in prior short-track races.
In the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series race on Saturday (at Martinsville), 96 of 250 laps were run under 14 caution laps.
A weekend before Martinsville, at Phoenix Raceway, 12 cautions for 86 laps shuffled the deck through a 312-lap event, leaving teams to rely on strategy time and again.
Sunday’s dominant driver, Denny Hamlin, took aim at this issue on his Actions Detrimental podcast, arguing that caution periods, particularly at stage breaks, have begun to drag out races and take away from the viewing experience.
He pointed out that those stretches push races into cooler conditions, where the track narrows into a one-lane run, and passing dries up.
He said, “We’re running too long under caution. We have to find a way to shorten them up, but we won’t shorten them up as long as we’re doing what we’re doing in the sense of ‘TV has to catch the pit stops live.’ OK, well then you’ve got to shorten your commercials or something.”
“[O’Reilly] Xfinity especially, I’m telling you my experience as a watcher, a single-car wreck, there’s not debris on the track, there’s no clean-up to be had, and it’s just yellow, yellow, yellow. I’m like ‘Choose already,’” he continued.
In Hamlin’s view, the link between broadcast demands and race control has stretched caution windows beyond what the situation calls for.
With networks cutting to commercials during pit stops, the delay builds, raising concern that fans may tune out if the pattern holds. He floated fixes such as side-by-side ad breaks or replaying pit stops after returning from commercials to get races back to green sooner.
The debate has also seen calls from within the garage and the stands to keep stage points while scrapping the mandatory caution at stage ends, to keep the race flowing without taking points off the table.
For one, Dale Earnhardt Jr. agrees with Hamlin’s take, pointing out that long cautions cut into the next stage and reduce time under green.
Responding to a post on X by Jeff Gluck, he wrote, “He’s right. It’s also chewing into the next stage and shortening up those parts of the race: taking product off the shelf.”
Further expanding on the topic, on his podcast The Dale Jr. Download, the veteran driver said, “NASCAR’s usually got a good reason why a caution is what it is. My comment, and I think some of Denny’s points too, was the length of the stage break cautions.”
But he understands that NASCAR’s not just going to get rid of stage cautions. However, Earnhardt takes an issue when the caution eats into the next stage.
He cited Pocono as the perfect example. The stage cautions tend to eat into 20% of the stage, which actually are manufactured yellows. But Junior simply pointed out that it shouldn’t eat up part of the remaining race.
And hence, Earnhardt doesn’t like the idea that the stage break caution takes 20% off of the next stage, stating, “That is not okay.”
Stage racing, brought in by NASCAR in 2017, splits events into segments with planned cautions. When those breaks stretch out, they take a bigger bite out of green-flag laps, leaving the sport walking a fine line between show and flow.
And those issues have now taken the spotlight, especially after last weekend at Martinsville.
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