NASCAR Chairman Brian France held a press conference at Charlotte Motor Speedway Friday, May 20th and discussed many issues in the sport, including, ‘Boy’s Have at it”, the Q&A:
Q. I’m wondering where you personally fall on the boys have at it issue? It’s a little tricky in that NASCAR has to maintain law and order, but you get all this outside interest and you bring all these new eyeballs and it gets people talking and it’s a real water cooler thing. So where do you personally fall, and what is the proper way to manage that?
BRIAN FRANCE: “Well, I think that’s a good question. I think there are limits. You saw one of the limits is that if you put anyone in danger, like what happened with Kevin Harvick and Kyle Busch where it was after the race had happened. think it’s important to note if you look through NASCAR’s history, one of the videos that showed the most Wednesday night was the famous finish at Daytona with Richard Petty and David Pearson where they obviously hit each other and spun out in the grass. You go through our history and that’s part of it, contact, emotion, in particular late in the race.
We’re like anybody. We can over officiate and over regulate in some circumstances, over a 60 year period of time. And I think our point was a couple years ago we thought we might be in a pattern of that, and we wanted to put it more in the drivers’ hands.
We never said there were no limits to that. You just can’t go around with a missile and a weapon out there. But if you’re having contact, that’s part of NASCAR. So it’s tough for us, but that’s what we do. And it’s tough for any sport to have certain areas of the game or in auto racing that are subjective as to what is too much, but we’ll figure that out.
We’re going to remain, obviously, a contact sport, and we’re going to remain with the basic philosophy that we’re putting more of it in the drivers’ hands. If they go over a line we think is there, we’ll deal with that.”
Q. What does probation mean and why was the All-Star Race included with Kevin and Kyle? A lot of fans are confused by that and think maybe because it’s a non-points event that it shouldn’t be included.
BRIAN FRANCE: ” What probation means is there is a different set of eyes and expectations that are placed on a driver who has been placed on probation. They’re going to have a more limited flexibility in how we’re going to officiate them should they be in a similar area that they have just violated.
Why it’s important to have consistent rules even through the All-Star Races is there are safety elements that are inter-affected between events. There are lots of different reasons why you just wouldn’t want to say we’re not going to have a standard set of NASCAR rules in the All-Star Race.
Keep in mind, given that there are no points at stake, by definition, it gets more aggressive. We know that. That’s fine. Drivers take more chances, they’re not worried about where they are in the point standings, so it’s going to be more aggressive and more competitive.
But if we took the lid off and said there are no rules or don’t worry about any ramifications that might extend into next week at all, then we believe that — as I said earlier in my remarks — there has to be limits to all of this. That would be above the limits that we believe going into an event would make any sense.
See full transcript of the interview: Brian France Interview – May 2011.(5-21-2011)
