{"id":9198,"date":"2021-07-19T13:08:45","date_gmt":"2021-07-19T17:08:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/?p=9198"},"modified":"2022-07-22T12:08:36","modified_gmt":"2022-07-22T16:08:36","slug":"white-zone-nascar-loudon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/2021\/07\/19\/white-zone-nascar-loudon\/","title":{"rendered":"The White Zone: NASCAR dropped the ball"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Kyle Busch<\/strong> summed it up, perfectly, NASCAR.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We started the race under a mist,&#8221; he said. &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.motorsport.com\/nascar-cup\/news\/kyle-busch-rain-loudon-crash\/6633424\/\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">It never should have gone green<\/a> to begin with, but then it kept getting worse and worse, lap over lap. The lap before I went into (Turn) 1 and it shoved the nose really bad and I was able to keep it under control.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It wasn\u2019t bad enough.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Then on <a href=\"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/2021\/07\/19\/aric-almirola-playoff-loudon\/\" target=\"_self\">Lap 6<\/a>, he was in the wall. As were\u00a0<strong>Martin Truex Jr.<\/strong> and\u00a0<strong>Denny Hamlin<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>NASCAR, why did this race start?<\/p>\n<h2>The White Zone: NASCAR dropped the ball<\/h2>\n<h3>What drivers were saying<\/h3>\n<p>Nothing about the weather or track conditions allowed the race to start. Spotters told their drivers rain was just minutes away and the league was working on a weeper in Turn 1 right up to the start.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Not to mention the weepers in Turn 1 never stopped <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/hp5KZCpZDr\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">https:\/\/t.co\/hp5KZCpZDr<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Jim Utter (@jim_utter) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/jim_utter\/status\/1416842503093903360?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">July 18, 2021<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Truex said it was &#8220;just ice&#8221; and that he almost lost the car a lap earlier, because the track was wet.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I hollered on the radio that the track is wet,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Like wet, wet. I tried to back it down and I got in there and it just kept going. I couldn\u2019t even slow it down.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>On the broadcast, rain drops covered the camera lenses. You could even see light sprinkles falling.<\/p>\n<p class=\"x_MsoNormal\">&#8220;We run slick tires and these cars don\u2019t have any grip on slick tires and wet asphalt,&#8221; he said. &#8220;To me, that\u2019s the job of the corner spotter has in NASCAR. They\u2019re sitting over there, they can feel when it\u2019s raining and see when it\u2019s raining.<\/p>\n<p class=\"x_MsoNormal\">&#8220;That\u2019s their job to tell NASCAR that it\u2019s raining and we have to stop so we don\u2019t have that situation.&#8221;<\/p>\n<h2>The White Zone: NASCAR dropped the ball<\/h2>\n<h3>Bottom line<\/h3>\n<p>Look, I get that officiating is a thankless job and it&#8217;s not always going to turn out the right choices. And I get that mistakes happen. But this isn&#8217;t the first time this has happened. This exact same mistake happened just eight months earlier at <a href=\"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/2020\/10\/28\/kyle-busch-fuel-winless-drought-texas\/\" target=\"_self\">Texas Motor Speedway<\/a>. Where it restarted a race, when the weather was bad, and race leader\u00a0<strong>Kevin Harvick<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/2020\/11\/02\/nascar-identity-crisis-playoffs\/\" target=\"_self\">wrecked in Turn 1<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>NASCAR, this is inexcusable. Not just that it happened, Sunday, but that it happened twice in the span of a calendar year.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s just hope this doesn&#8217;t continue, after the Olympic break.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s my view, for what it&#8217;s worth.<\/p>\n<p><strong>TOP IMAGE: Jared C. Tilton\/Getty Images<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kyle Busch summed it up, perfectly, NASCAR. &#8220;We started the race under a mist,&#8221; he said. &#8220;It never should have gone green to begin with, but then it kept getting worse and worse, lap over lap. The lap before I went into (Turn) 1 and it shoved the nose really bad and I was able [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3353,"featured_media":9190,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5,1664],"tags":[148,1496,261,159,14,1434,371,194,1161,1325],"class_list":["post-9198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-nascar","category-nascar-cup-series","tag-denny-hamlin","tag-foxwoods-resort-casino-301","tag-kyle-busch","tag-martin-truex-jr","tag-nascar","tag-nascar-2021","tag-nascar-cup-series","tag-new-hampshire-motor-speedway","tag-steve-odonnell","tag-the-white-zone"],"modified_by":"Michael Kovacs, ADMIN","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3353"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9198\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}