Catchfence

With a new decade has come – believe it or not – sign that NASCAR may finally be starting to get it. A story is circulating that NASCAR may drop its out-of-bounds and no-bump-zone rules for Daytona and Talladega. Driver reaction is said to be “mixed,” but there has never been any credible argument for either rule and it is long past time these rules be aborted once and for all.

The yellow line rule dates to April 2001; following the Alabama 300 for BGN cars at Talladega, Jimmy Spencer was livid in several postrace interviews about drivers passing him below the yellow line. The next day, NASCAR told drivers they could not pass below the yellow line. The rule became a huge controversy in its next race, the infamous 2001 Firecracker 400; Tony Stewart blew past several cars under the line on the eastern short chute and was blackflagged out of contention.

The rule became an even bigger controversy – and illustrated the jostling issues of rules favoritism and rule sagacity – in the 2003 Alabama 500; Dale Junior blew past Matt Kenseth on the apron of Turn Three at Talladega with five laps to go – and was not blackflagged. Instead, NASCAR issued a convoluted explanation that he had “completed” the pass before going below the line. This argument failed on two fronts – Junior was nowhere close to clearing anyone – and thus nowhere close to completing the pass – when he hit the apron; plus this was not the start-finish line, it was Turn Three. Scoring loops are not where such matters are supposed to be decided.

The explanation was classic CYA by NASCAR. It was the sanctioning body making a decision based on favoritism instead of using competitive objectivity, and trying to cover itself in the aftermath. It was one of numerous cases in the most recent decade where bad rules and bad officiating got in the way of superior competition.

The next egregious example came in the 2008 Autumn 500 – Regan Smith passed Tony Stewart on the apron of the trioval to win; the win was taken away by NASCAR on the basis of the yellow-line rule, even though NASCAR’s Ramsey Poston had stated months earlier that the rule did not apply on the final lap.

A defense of the yellow line rule is that it was preventing wrecks – a defense than made no sense to start with given the inability of anyone to cite one example of a wreck that happened specifically because of racing below the yellow line. It made even less sense in the infamous 2009 Daytona 500 when Dale Junior hooked Brian Vickers under the yellow line and spun him into traffic. The rule was also cited in several wrecks that had happened earlier in Speedweeks, notably a Truck 250 melee involving Todd Bodine.

Then there is the fact the rule was never implemented for any other track, as NASCAR in typical fashion dithered on whether to extend the rule to other tracks, even as cars raced on the trioval apron at Fontana and Michigan and Kansas.

The reality is the yellow line rule took away a legitimate passing lane, and that NASCAR may drop the rule indicates – ten years late – that it now understands this fact.

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The no-bump zone rule is the more recent egregious rules mistake the sanctioning body may now be acknowledging. No-bump zones debuted at Daytona in 2006 – and went unenforced. No one was flagged off the track for pushing another car through the corners. The rule was forgotten at Talladega, but came back last November at Talladega. The impetus was lobbying by Jeff Gordon and at least one other driver about the Winston 500 that April – in that race there were two occasions when two cars literally locked together and were able to break the draft; the first happened early in the race’s final third, and the pack lined up and ran down the two-car breakaway; later in the race’s GWC finish, two pairs of cars locked together and broke the draft – Brad Keselowski then went after a swerving Carl Edwards and the result was Edwards blasted into the fencing, Ryan Newman ramming through Edwards’ nose, and Mike Helton going to the drivers meeting on November 1 to issue a bluff – that NASCAR “would have a problem” if drivers pushed each other through the corners.

Of course the day before the Trucks ran 250 miles with the kind of pushing that had happened in April, and there was no breakaway. Plus there was the matter of the unenforced no-bump zones of 2006. So drivers saw the bluff for what it was and raced accordingly – they gave the “rule” lip-service, pushed each other through the corners (it was humorous hearing the MRN call dramatically citing “now they back off each other entering the corner” even though most of the time they were racing as they’d done in April) and also lined up to stop any two-car group from breaking the draft.

The race was derided as boring, but this was a case of taking a bluff seriously as well as letting three periods define a race that don’t. The reality remains that push-drafting is a legitimate tactic. The overused term bump-drafting is a gross misnomer because they’re not bumping, they’re physically speeding up the car in front of them to pass people. Bumping is gratuitous contact common of course to short tracks and which tends to cause fights in the pit area (making nonsense of the “rubbing is racing” cliche); pushing in this context is making something positive happen.

Push-drafting thus has every place in racing, and is more common than people think from the sport’s “back in the day” period to recent times, having directly witnessed it at Pocono on restarts this past season and before, such as Jeff Gordon and Jeff Burton push-drafting from over ten seconds back to catch Ward Burton at Pocono in 1997. There is of course such imagery as Richard Petty blasting Bobby Allison, Buddy Baker, or Bobby Isaac past AJ Foyt at Ontario Motor Speedway in the early 1970s.

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These two rules are examples of the officiating tower given more control of the racing than it has any right to have, and taking that control from the tower need not stop here. There are other cases – pit closure and pit speed limits discussed in an earlier piece – where the officiating tower needs to have control of the racing taken out and given back to the racers. The tower’s sole legitimate concerns need to be enforced and the extra nonsense needs to be seized away.

If and when NASCAR drops no-bump zones and yellow-line rules, then the first important steps will have been taken.