NASCAR executive isn't sure they have a superspeedway problem

NASCAR’s senior vice president of competition, Elton Sawyer, isn’t sure the Cup Series superspeedway product is as dire as it was made out to be after the race at Talladega on Sunday.

“When you’re sitting in race control and we’re standing up and watching, our fans are standing on their feet,” Sawyer told SiriusXM NASCAR Radio on Tuesday. “We’re four wide, in some cases we’re five wide, then they’re back to single file. Our fans are standing up, they’re cheering.”

“Then you get looking at the metrics and you look at the stats after the race, and you have 67 lead changes among 23 different drivers. So, when we look at all of that, it’s like, what are we trying to fix? What’s not going the way we would like it?”

 There 67 lead changes but the added context was that the field spent a large majority of the race running half to three-quarters throttle saving fuel in the hopes of getting track position by spending less time on pit road.

Once the field starts pushing towards the end of a stage or the race, they get locked down two-by-two, not allowing a driver to attempt to form a third line due to how much drag is built into the seventh-generation platform.  

And to his point, to a certain degree, fuel saving has always been built into the superspeedway product to a degree be it single-file against the wall or half throttle in packs four or five-wide.

Read more: Let's have a nuanced conversation about Sunday

The issue is what happened at the end of the race where the field is either locked into place or make a move that results in a massive crash.

And yet, Sawyer says the superspeedway product is not as dire as the ongoing short track package development.

“I get it, when we start talking about short track packages, when we have a guy that leads in a 400-some laps of a 500-lap race,” Sawyer said. “Okay, we’re going to do our best to try and work on that and figure out what we can do. But, when you have 67 lead changes among 23 different drivers, I’m not really sure what we’re going to work on there. But as always, we want to get better.”

“So, we want to have 70 lead changes, we want to have 25 or 30 different drivers that lead races. So, I think a lot of words there, but the short answer is we’re always looking at our product, whether it’s superspeedway, road courses, intermediates, short track, we’re always looking at it, trying to make it better.”