How the field is ‘frozen’ and why no red flag at Talladega:
April 27, 2004 at 12:00 AM
The final four laps of the 188-lap race at Talladega Superspeedway ran under a yellow flag. The final caution, brought out by Vickers’ spin, came too late for NASCAR to throw a red flag and stop the race, and also too late to get a restart. Had Vickers’ incident come on lap 182 instead of 184, the race would have been stopped. “We would have had time to clean up, open the pits and still have at least three laps to get up to speed and race,” NASCAR Vice President Jim Hunter said on Monday. “We missed by two laps.” NASCAR informs the teams at its drivers meeting each raceday morning of the last lap when a red flag will be waved with the aim of insuring a green-flag finish. At Talladega, there would be no red flag from lap 183 on. So when the late caution came out, the field was frozen, under another NASCAR edict that forbids racing back to the yellow flag. At precisely that point, #24-Jeff Gordon was ahead of #8-Dale Earnhardt Jr. The freeze-frame moment was recorded by what NASCAR calls “scoring loops,” a series of marking spots around the track where electronic lines under the surface register the running order from signals transmitted by transponders in the race cars. At Talladega, there are eight markers imbedded under the 2.66-mile track. “We go back to the nearest scoring loop to the accident and then to whatever video is available,” Hunter said. In this case, the video showed the caution came while Vickers’ wreck was in progress and Gordon was nearly a full car length ahead of Earnhardt Jr. “Gordon was first when the caution came out and also first to cross the loop line,” Hunter said. As for managing a restart with just four laps to go, the problem was not so much cleaning up the debris from Vickers’ incident but sorting the running order through the full field where cars were racing three wide when the caution fell. With the red-flag option gone, the result would have been, at best, a one-lap shootout. Memories of massive pileups at Talladega and Daytona on two-lap restarts made that call a no-go. “We wouldn’t start it with two to go at Daytona or Talladega,” Hunter said.(Alabama Live)(4-27-2004)
