NASCAR‘s Cook Out Clash at Bowman Gray on Wednesday was an adventurous affair, and not just because the race was postponed three days due the impacts of a severe winter weather system. Even on Wednesday night during the Clash, the sport had to deal with sleet on the track.
The first 100 or so laps of the race went fairly smoothly, though there were a decent number of cautions. Still, it was what you would have expected.
Then things got funky. The Athletic’s Jeff Gluck explained.
“As I’m tweeting about the halfway break I’m looking in my phone and there’s moisture on my phone, and it’s not me spitting on my screen or something,” Gluck said on The Teardown podcast. “I’m looking up and you’re like, ‘Uh oh,’ and you start to see it in the lights and it was more and more.
“Then it started to get that crisp, pinginess. Not snow, but like that icy little pellets on your face. You’re like, ‘Oh, it is sleeting right now.’ Then you could see it and you’re like, ‘OK, well that might be a little bit more than just like a little rainshower or something. I don’t know what they’re going to do with this, because it’s almost freezing already.’ That’s really when the race changed to me.”
The second half of the race was mired by a whole slew of cautions. Drivers couldn’t quite figure out how to race for speed while keeping from sliding around the track at the Clash.
“The first 100 laps were fine, but then there was that break and you’re like, ‘Goodness,’” Jordan Bianchi of The Athletic said. “It was supposed to be a 10-minute break and they’re going to change tires, OK, get back out there. But that extended because of the weather.
“Then they put them on the race track and they’re circling and circling. You’ve got wet weather tires. It felt like one of those situations we’ve seen at New Hampshire and some other places where NASCAR’s kind of in this weird in-between of like, ‘Yeah, we’ve got the wet-weather package but we’re just not 100% confident or feeling good about it to a point we want to go with it, so we’re just going to kind of hope.’ And that’s what they did, is they hoped that this thing was going to pass.”
Everyone had a different feel for how to race things after a combination of light rain and sleet hit the track. NASCAR did its best to clear the track for the second half of the Clash, but some of it was inevitable.
Luckily, things weren’t so bad that NASCAR couldn’t finish the race. Ryan Preece took home the win after taking charge later on.
But the Clash probably wasn’t quite what NASCAR was looking for in terms of attracting new viewers. It was choppy and a bit disjointed.
“It wasn’t a big front,” Bianchi said. “And eventually it cleared, but it just was… again, I go back to the TV thing, if you’re watching this at home, you’re like why are these cars circling, why aren’t they racing? It didn’t help, they weren’t wrong in what they said. They were right. Kevin Harvick and Clint Bowyer were saying like, ‘Oh, these guys can race.’ You were hearing it from drivers in the car. Some drivers were saying, ‘Hey, we can race.’ Other drivers were saying you can’t. And so if you’re at home watching this you’re like, ‘What’s going on here?’
“It’s just this weird in between and if this race is about getting people’s attention and getting people excited for NASCAR and for what’s to come, the Daytona 500 in a couple weeks, like that, this, the way circumstances came together is not it. It’s unfortunate, and I don’t know how you change it other than like a venue or something like that. You saw what happened in LA a couple years ago. It just sometimes doesn’t matter. It’s just Mother Nature was a bear and it just worked against NASCAR in the worst way.”