Sunday’s EchoPark Automotive Grand Prix at Austin, TX’s Circuit of the Americas was fairly uneventful, with William Byron leading 42 of 68 laps as he cruised to his second win of the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series season.
That means the NASCAR world will be searching elsewhere for talking points in the coming days and one of the biggest has to be COTA’s track limits rule that doomed a number of drivers over the course of the weekend.
As a result of complaints from last year, drivers and teams were told this weekend that any driver whose entire vehicle ventured outside of the rumble strips between turns three and six, the “esses” part of the track, would be assessed a pass-thru penalty on pit-road, worth roughly 30 seconds.
Both of Saturday’s races, in the Craftsman Truck Series and Xfinity Series, were marred by such penalties with the most notable coming with Shane van Gisbergen on the final lap of the Xfinity race. After crossing the finish line in second, he was demoted to a 27th-place finish.
Sunday’s Cup race didn’t see quite the same volume of penalties, but had perhaps the most egregious one of the weekend when Chase Elliott had to drive off course to save his car and was still penalized, despite actually losing ground in doing so.
Plenty of voices around the NASCAR community aired their displeasure with the rule, most notably Dale Earnhardt Jr.
The biggest issue with the rule is that it was arbitrarily put in place only for a select few turns on the race track, while drivers were allowed to cut corners or use the runoff area around the rest of the circuit. Additionally, the pass-thru penalty was far too harsh for something that only gained drivers a split second of time on the track or in Elliott’s case, none at all.
One of NASCAR’s biggest calling cards historically is that drivers are not over-officiated the way they are in racing series such as Formula One and IndyCar. This rule was a bad look and hopefully it will be done away with next time the series comes to Austin.
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