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Josh Gross
Following Joey Logano’s victory at Atlanta Motor Speedway, NASCAR leaves Georgia this week and heads to Texas. Thus, let’s wrap up action from this past Sunday’s Ambetter Helath 400, review numbers from last year at Austin, and assess some expectations for this Sunday’s EchoPark Automotive Grand Prix at Circuit of the Americas.
Ambetter Health 400 Wrap Up
Much like Daytona a month ago, there’s nothing really to be cognizant of going forward from Atlanta. This hybrid intermediate superspeedway will forever be its own type of race and only applicable unto itself going into the Summer Daytona race.
It’s especially unimportant heading into the first road race of the season as two races could be no further apart from, in correlation, between a superspeedway race and a road course event.
Austin — 2022
As stated above, NASCAR heads to Austin for its first road course race of the 2023 season. Circuit of the Americas is a 3.426-mile asphalt road course that was built in 2012 with its prime purpose to serve as a track for F1. As the years have gone on, more and more racing bodies have implemented COTA into their schedule as its modern facilities provide an experience for fans while producing exciting racing for the drivers.
The first NASCAR race at COTA was about as bad as it could be, with endless rain all weekend, rain that eventually forced NASCAR to call the event early as the water began to pond along the front stretchs. In the final year of the Generation Six car, NASCAR got a full display of everything they needed to fix with the Gen Seven car in order to produce a vehicle capable of racing on a wet surface.
However, in year two of racing at COTA, the skies cleared, and the NASCAR world got to see what racing on this track is like when it’s just the drivers and their cars and not the weather. Through 32 laps, the race had gone green throughout and the only yellow flags were for stage breaks. However, from laps 42 through 67, the yellow flag flew six times and really impacted the flow of this race. Averaged out, the typical green flag run that Sunday only lasted 5.6 laps.
With three laps remaining, Loriz Hezeman’s vehicle came to a stop in turn three and set up a green-white-checker scenario. With everyone bunched back together, the inevitable turn-one wreck (a recurring theme at road courses, regardless of venue, in 2022) occurred between Joey Logano, Kyle Larson and Bubba Wallace that setup a second try at overtime. This time, another wreck ensued (with no caution flag) that saw AJ Allmendinger go from potential winner to finishing the race a lap down in 33rd place while Ross Chastain sailed to victory.
Now, it wasn’t like Chastain stole a victory that day from Allmendinger, despite basically wrecking him as he drove through him to get to the lead on that final restart. Chastain topped the speed chart at COTA with the both the fastest green flag speed and total speed rankings. Chastain led nearly half the race (31) while also knocking down 17 fastest laps (only 46 were registered that day due to the myriad of stage three cautions). Furthermore, Chastain’s teammate (Daniel Suarez) started second, grabbed the lead on the first lap, and led 15 laps before shuffling back and finishing 24th. Suarez ranked top 10 in both green flag and total speed rankings himself that Sunday.
Team Trackhouse found early speed in the Gen Seven car, something that should have shocked no one, knowing that their owner (Justin Marks) was a former road course specialist, under many different disciplines, and was used as a “ringer” in the Xfinity Series for Chip Ganassi.
Expectations for the 2023 EchoPark Automotive Grand Prix
The first thing to check on a road course weekend, the weather forecast, looks favorable for this upcoming Sunday with a high of 81 and mostly sunny conditions. Thus, the variables that accompany the rain can be disregarded, or at least we assume so based on early weather models.
As per the event, the first thing to figure out is what impact the new stage break rule has on racing. In years prior, the caution flag has always been thrown to mark stage breaks. These two mandatory cautions have impacted racing as it made drivers decide — were they chasing stage points or a potential win because it wasn’t often that they could do both.
With the impending yellow flag, drivers with an eye toward a victory would generally pit early so they could have optimum starting position when the next stage began. However, now that racing will somewhat resemble what it did pre-stage cautions, it will be really interesting to see how differently the field approaches Sunday’s race. Unless something happens on the track to merit a yellow flag, when the stage break hits, the racing will continue as normal. While it would mean chaos for us DFS players to figure out, my sincere hope as a fan is that it opens up drivers to attempt racing the event backward with how they approach their pit stops. More strategy usually means better quality racing.
The second piece of this puzzle will be impacted by the first. With no caution flags flying in the first half of the event, the field could potentially get really spread out and help prevent drivers from wrecking one another in restart scenarios. However, this doesn’t account for mechanical failures or a driver missing a turn and getting stuck somewhere on the track where NASCAR feels forced to throw a caution flag. What we’ve learned about NASCAR road racing is that when the field gets bunched back together, late in a race, all bets are off as anyone can attack turn-one too aggressively and flip DFS on its head as a heavily rostered driver loses double-digit positions.
Finally, how will the new short track package impact racing? The short track package, we just saw at Phoenix, is also the package utilized on road courses. With Phoenix practice and race speeds in mind, it will be interesting if the same fast drivers in the United Rentals 500 are the same fast drivers we see in Saturday practice. If correlation does exist between the two practice sessions, it could be really simple as per driver selection post-qualifying for DFS.
