NASCAR officials will go home after this weekend with homework intended to fix the byproduct of a gimmick with yet another gimmick.
Such are the times we live in.
By their own admission, NASCAR viewed Friday’s Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series qualifying session from Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, California as a mockery.
And they at least got that part right.
Austin Dillon won the pole with a lap time of 0:00.00 at 0 miles per hour when all 12 drivers who made the final round failed to turn a single lap over the five minutes that determined the qualifying order for the top-12 positions.
Thus, times reverted to the second round and Dillon was awarded the pole.
This entire scenario was the result of NASCAR’s new downforce-heavy drafting rules package and the sanctioning body’s off-season decision to retain the group qualifying format that has been in effect since the 2015 season.
With this package producing so much drag, the first car that peels off pit road is essentially a sitting duck. The huge spoiler acts as a parachute and creates a slipstream for the following cars to draft at quicker speeds than the leader.
The element that was created to generate more exciting races, makes for an even goofier group qualifying show.
As a result, the drivers who make the final rounds engage in a series of fake-offs in order to encourage one of the other 11 contenders to peel off first but do so before time runs out and none of them are able to complete a timed lap.
The latter is what happened on Friday in Southern California.
Enter veteran Aric Almirola …
"That is the product of the environment we are in," he said. "We are all very dependent of posting a good lap based on the draft that you get. You are in that box and it is really stressful trying to figure out when to leave pit road and what position to put yourself in and you can’t be the lead car. The lead car is at such a disadvantage."
Worse off is that NASCAR suspected this would eventually happen all along. When the sanctioning body first mandated group qualifying back in 2015, these were the sort of games that Truck Series drivers would engage in since they featured low horsepower, high drag vehicles not too dissimilar to what the Cup Series has now.
NASCAR officials ultimately ordered the Truck Series to return to single-vehicle time trials. As for the Cup Series this season, NASCAR suspected the worst and hoped for the best, a proven business model if there ever was one.
"It's a little bit on us in that we hoped things would go better than that," NASCAR Senior Vice President of Competition Scott Miller told reporters after the session ended amidst a chorus of boos from the handful of fans who were subjected to the … whatever that was.
"It’s an exciting show when they’re out there on the race track, but obviously, we have a little work to do on our part to get a little bit better format so things like can’t happen. We certainly want to provide our fans with what they deserve. We and the teams didn’t do a very good job of that today. We’re really disappointed."
What were the teams supposed to do? Sabotage their own qualifying efforts?
Noted 2019 package critic Kyle Busch …
"It has nothing to do with the competitors," the 2015 champion said. "Don’t hate the players, hate the game. … You can’t be the leader. If you’re the leader, you don’t qualify up front. It’s going to be all about who can figure out the timing from leaving pit road to coming back around to being able to take the flag with the time running out for everybody else behind them."
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