Opinion: Much to appreciate and scrutinize from NASCAR Talladega

As is often the case, the current state of superspeedway racing and the Jack Link's 500 on Sunday at Talladega requires nuance.

The racing product is not entirely compelling right now, especially in comparison to its Xfinity Series counterpart, but there is still room to appreciate what happened on Sunday, right?

Even in the face of a rules package where objectively no one can pass, which increasingly causes big blocks and quick-trigger lead changes that cause the Big One, no such massive melee happened.

And sure, part of that is that a pair of Ford Performance drivers locked down the front row in front of a pair of Hendrick Motorsports drivers and there was no chance of starting a third lane with this car. So instead, everyone was forced to stay in place.

This is from last year but the point remains valid.

And this is what made Busch feel that way.

.@KyleBusch could tell you why no one made a move. pic.twitter.com/pM6EPl4PwE

However, there is something to appreciate about how this particular race finished too.

Instead of spending all race talking about fuel conservation and spending less time on pit road in the hopes of leapfrogging everyone else to obtain track position, only to ultimately render the entire 500-mile storyline moot with a series of race deciding crashes, the entire race mattered for once.

Austin Cindric won because Ford Performance had the best fuel conservation strategy and the No. 2 team executed on pit road. They won because their driver seized on the opportunity of Kyle Larson pushing Ryan Preece out too far ahead of William Byton and allowed them to take the front row.

Typically, all of this matters until it doesn’t, a Big One occurring anywhere from first to last and there being no safe place to hide from it. Then these races come down to a series of green-white-checkers in which someone who didn’t have the best strategy and pit stop winning purely on survival.

Read more: The inconsequential stupidity of February’s Daytona 500

But again, it’s worth mentioning that the same thing happened in the Xfinity Series on Saturday too in terms of no ridiculous race altering melee that rendered all the strategic developments irrelevant.

Sure, there was a frustrating caution that served as a reminder that NASCAR race control is still working to balance sporting satisfaction and safety but that race was the total package. It’s also hard to argue anytime decisions are made in the name of driver safety too if you’re trying to argue with any degree of intellectual honesty.

But it’s also fair to concede that this car still needs a lot of work to deliver similar satisfaction on Sundays.

Everywhere but intermediate tracks, really.

So, we can have that conversation as long as we all in good faith admit that it’s also rewarding to see a superspeedway weekend decided straight-up without violent race affecting shenanigans.

Ryan Preece wasn’t launched into the air again!

So with that said, where do we really go with this car, Kyle Larson?

"I would assume drag would probably be a big thing, maybe," said the not usually technically astute driver. "But I don't even know what's on there that creates so much drag so I'm not sure. I'm sure people have ideas but I don't know. I'm not sure."

His crew chief, Cliff Daniels, summed up the challenges in a very articulate way.

“All the normal factors that come into play,” Daniels said. “Outer body drag and downforce against available horsepower and where that ratio lies -- the (lift) over (drag) to the horsepower. The available grip and the horsepower. The tire and I don’t mean the compound. These tires are wide and have a lot of grip.

“The physics of what this package presents puts it to where when the field is wide open and nose-to-tail, it’s really high energy and you’re going really fast but it’s also harder to create new energy to advance within the pack, which is why pushing comes into play and things like that.

“The really interesting dynamic is that this car holds up really well too. The old car, or Xfinity racing, the bumper degrades as the race goes on. The nose gets pushed in and the tail gets pushed in so it’s harder to push and steer people. These cars hold up pretty well so you can continue to use the same methodology to advance your lane. I don’t know that I can offer you an exact answer but its in the category of (lift) over (drag) versus horsepower and available tire and grip and how that affects the car here.”

His peer at Hendrick Motorsports, the No. 24 crew chief Rudy Fugle was equally articulate.

“To me, it’s not easy to drive at all when you’re getting pushed and going really hard and locking bumpers,” Fugle said. “If we can get the cars to where they are harder to drive wide open and not lock on very much, that would be the best case where you can get some more movement, more handling … a little harder to drive wide open.

“This means speeding the cars up but then it becomes a safety problem so it’s a rob Peter to pay Paul situation. So it’s a really tough situation for NASCAR for all of us to say we want to go 10 mph faster and see what happens.”

Fugle said whatever decisions get made will also require patience as each experiment will require a season’s worth of data points to fully understand what progress was or was not made.

All of this is to say, while we all agree this isn’t ideal, there isn’t some snap of the finger decision that NASCAR can make to make it all better and we have to provide them a degree of grace as they work on it too.

And this also may be the least popular opinion here:

While conceding that Saturday’s race was the closest thing to a perfect superspeedway product, debating that and trying to achieve that has been a 25-year-plus work in progress.

No matter what changes get made, or the generation of car, this is ultimately a very polarizing subdiscipline of racing and we are going to have these debates for the rest of time.

So, from that standpoint, try to enjoy a race like Sunday, where at least all three hours was consequential towards the result of the race.

It mattered and that was kind of cool.