Christopher Bell and Brett Moffitt won the races at Iowa Speedway in two different fashions on Sunday.
The NASCAR Xfinity and Gander Outdoors Truck Series took center stage at Iowa Speedway on Father’s Day Sunday and delivered two action-packed races in a way the entire industry needed.
For at least one week, the talk will not be about packages and overall disenchantment, but rather exiting and competitive racing at one of the most unique venues in the discipline.
To be sure, there are controversies, because there always is in major league motorsports, but Sunday seemed like a low-key win for NASCAR even without the spotlight of the premier division on track.
What we learned from the M&Ms 200 (NGOTS) and Circuit City 250 (NXS) can be found below.
THE JOHNNY SAUTER DILEMMA
NASCAR has a complicated decision to make over the next day or so when it comes to whether or not to suspend veteran Truck Series contender Johnny Sauter.
Such things are never as simple as stated, but Sauter essentially wrecked Austin Hill on purpose under caution following a series of incidents on track between them in the M&Ms 200. There’s a he said-he said between them over what led to it, but how Sauter ended the proceedings will surely lead to some kind of punitive response from the sanctioning body.
It very well could get the 2016 Truck Series champion suspended.
There is certainly historical precedence with NASCAR sitting Kyle Busch down for the Cup and Xfinity races at Texas Motor Speedway in 2011 following a similar act of retribution upon Ron Hornaday in the Truck Series race that same weekend.
But this is more complicated because suspending Sauter for a race or two during the regular season would also cause Sauter to lose his playoff eligibility, assuming NASCAR didn’t offer a corresponding waiver, and that would be quite the bold statement.
Does Sauter’s crime warrant stripping him of the chance to race for a championship?
The case could be made, because Sauter was driving recklessly in a moment that could theoretically endanger safety workers, and that’s something that league officials can’t allow to go unpunished.
It also appeared as if Hill had no intent to make the corner without crashing Sauter in the previous incident, at speed and under green flag conditions. Suspending Sauter will send the message that revenge is likely served best under green flag conditions and at race speeds.
All told, it’s just unfortunate for the division because Sauter’s exclusion from the playoff mix will nearly lock everyone in place, especially given the disqualification of Ross Chastain on Sunday at Iowa. Todd Gilliland would slide into the final provisional playoff spot and it would come down to whether some combination of Chastain, Gilliland, Sheldon Creed or Harrison Burton could win.
Would it not still be a heavy-handed penalty to strip Sauter of his automatic playoff eligible victory and suspend him for a race, not ending his team’s championship hopes in the process?
That’s what makes suspensions and penalties so complicated in the win and you’re in playoff era.
ROOM OF DOOM
It took five months, but NASCAR’s new post-race disqualification policy found its first victim on Sunday at Iowa.
In CLUE terminology:
It was Ross Chastain in Iowa with the ride height rule violation.
One of the best stories in NASCAR over the past calendar year has been the ascent of Chastain and his even more recent decision to change his championship eligibility from Xfinity to Trucks. It was never a fait accompli that he would win his way into the playoffs, especially given that he gave himself just eight weeks to do so.
But then came a dominant Iowa performance in which he swept all three stages and sealed the deal … before a post-race inspection found that the front of his Niece Motorsports No. 44 was “extremely” too low.
The team claims it was the result of on-track damage and it very well could have been given how low the truck was found, but the rules are the rules. The decision has been appealed and it will be curious to see if the Niece team can provide enough evidence to at least reduce the infraction to a fine.
If they are unable to, that leaves Chastain just six races to again win his way into the Field of 8 — Chicagoland, Kentucky, Pocono, Eldora and Michigan.
That, plus a potential Sauter ineligibility spells good things for Todd Gilliland, who would then claim the final provisional spot, which leads us to the next section …
THE RUDY FUGLE EFFECT
Speaking of Gilliland, it was another frustrating day in the Truck Series for the third-generation driver as he finished 10th on Sunday after gaining a position due to Chastain’s disqualification.
His performance with KBM continues to puzzle because this is a guy that won in Late Model Stocks, won in his ARCA debut and won in his K&N East and K&N West debuts as well.
But for whatever reason, it just isn’t clicking with the current No. 4 team. He was recently separated from crew chief Marcus Richmond, placed with Wes Ward at Texas and Michael Shelton at Iowa.
There will come a point that Gilliland and KBM may have to cut ties if results do not improve as Richmond and Shelton are both exceptional crew chiefs.
But holding both Gilliland and Harrison Burton to the standards of the No. 51 team, led by Rudy Fugle, might be unrealistic.
Burton finished third on Sunday and followed it up with a fourth-place in just his second Xfinity Series race later in the afternoon, so clearly Burton is capable of matching his own Late Model and K&N success.
And certainly, Mike Hillman Jr. is a championship-winning truck builder but has three wins over his last eight seasons. In comparison, Fugle has 28 over the past half-decade. He’s clearly a cut above the rest of the field and showed it again by steering uberprospect Chandler Smith to contention in his series debut.
The excuses are starting to run out for Gilliland, who needs to start running inside the top-five and closing out when given the opportunity, but it’s worth wondering how the other KBM drivers would fare under his guidance — especially since they are so often compared to Erik Jones, William Byron and Christopher Bell.
Drivers who raced alongside Fugle.
ON THE DOUBLEHEADER AND ATTENDANCE
It wasn’t intended to go down this way but having both the Xfinity Series and Gander Outdoor Trucks race on Sunday was a nice delight.
It’s just a shame that the crowd didn’t reflect the opportunity to see two upper-tier NASCAR divisions on the same day. And unfortunately for the track just outside of Des Moines, attendance numbers remain a story that keeps coming up despite pleas from a number of NASCAR fans that the Cup Series should race there.
At the same time, NASCAR is more and more of a television product so we maybe shouldn’t care as much about attendance, especially for a Xfinity-Trucks standalone weekend. After all, there are Cup weekends that are forcing tracks to tear down grandstands so that isn’t exactly the best barometer for what warrants a date.
Unfortunately, neither is quality of racing as Iowa continues to deliver an action-packed show for any division that races there.
The only gripe for the Iowa schedule, and it certainly wouldn’t have mattered this year, is that it probably should be a Saturday doubleheader to allow the industry to have Father’s Day Sunday off.
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