Elton Sawyer, NASCAR's senior vice president of competition, discusses the possibility that road course's will see changes to stages in 2024.
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29 comments
How about we settle this for once and for all and just get rid of stages?
Why the hell would we go back to stage cautions
Why the hell did we even start them to begin with?!?!
@Matthew L. Lewis because fans bitched and moaned about how boring the races were and how the drivers werent trying until the end. NASCAR listened to the fans. Just like they did about boring championships before ’04. Fans refuse to accept that they caused most, if not all, of the changes they hate,
@RJ TwentySix you must be talking to those se.”fans” that Brian France talked to after he took that bottle of pills and right before he came up with the Chase! Are these the same “fans” that were complaining that we need more drama on qualifying day, less weeks o. speedweeks, more commercials in a shorter race that starts later in the day on Saturday? And we wanna watch it on cable not network TV too!
@RJ TwentySix it is on the business to properly decipher the customers’ needs. The fans are not the ones responsible for NASCAR making changes, often at a whim, because it cannot translate its customers’ needs.
“Just like they did about boring championships before ’04.” This comment shows just how clueless you truly are in the oft-regurgitated and inaccurate “fans are bad!!!!” comments from NASCAR’s ardent defenders like yourself. Fans prior to 2004, especially after Newman won 8 races in 03 and couldn’t sniff the championship, wanted one thing: wins to be worth far more points than they were. Prior to 2004, you could win but only tie 2nd place in points gained if 2nd place led the most laps. Fans wanted anywhere from 10 to 50 more points for winning.
NASCAR capitulated in 2004 and gave the winner a whopping 5 extra points – almost nothing in the Latford era – and then also completely overhauled the points format with the Chase, which nobody except NASCAR itself wanted.
No. Please just get rid of stage cautions everywhere. I love that stage points award consistency and running up front throughout the race but the cautions ruin the flow. It’s great without the stage cautions.
we dont need stage cautions at road courses or anywhere for that matter!
I love how NASCAR will try anything except actually fixing the damn race cars. THE AERO PACKAGE IS THE PROBLEM.
Give the cars 100 or more HP, go back to 10,000RPM, get tires that wear out, eliminate shifting on ovals and scrap the diffuser/underbody.
The diffuser is helpful especially for roadcourses! The problem is horsepower other than that I love the gen 7!
@Mike loves drawing but all the diffuser is doing is making them even easier to drive and the dirty air worse when directly behind someone, as it makes the wake stronger but narrower (which is why 1.5 mile tracks are good, and single groove tracks bad )!
Go back to H pattern transmissions, it wasn’t a problem before.
Get rid of stage cautions all together. It’s not that hard.
I would love to see 100 more horsepower on the cars for short tracks and roadcourses!
It makes the teams actually strategize when there isn’t set cautions. I like the road courses consistent speed without those cautions. Two to Three laps on a road course eats a lot of time to enjoy the race
constructive criticism instead of just flat out saying “no”? in the nascar community? this is ridiculous!
It actually does the opposite. It creates less strategy. On road courses if you have the lead or top 10 you race to the stage then pit. Some cars might pit early to undercut a car or two, but that really only gives them a position or two that they end up losing. With Stage Cautions lead cars now have to make a choice, points or position. Then if they stop early for position then that same question falls to every car before them.
Stage breaks are so dumb. It breaks up the pacing of a good race IMO. The road courses have been the best races, to me, because there is no break unless there is trouble on the track.
Get rid of Stage Racing all together, fix the Aero Package, and give the cars 850HP.
Lets go Byron!
NO MORE STAGE CAUTIONS. Change the car to where it’s not so hard to pass instead!
they have tried that many times and how is that going?
No road racing is fine stage wise, make this the norm at other tracks!
It would be real stupid to throw stage cautions. As someone who went to this race, keep it with without the cautions.
We love no stage cautions at the road courses! Expand it to include all tracks longer than 1.5 miles in 2024! Get back to fuel, and pit, strategy at the longer tracks, and Superspeedways!
Also increase the horsepower by 100 horses at road courses, and tracks shorter than 1.3 miles.
NO STAGE BREAKS!!!!! The fastest car winning an all-green flag race is *not a bad thing!* If anything, just make the races longer!
For Watkins Glen, personally I’d like for them to actually enforce track limits there. New cars actually have larger brakes that can slow cars much better and encourage more overtakes when the space is much more of a premium and potentially spice up the race as leaders might get caught extending track limits and receive passthrough penalty and give chance to the chasing drivers to catch up much more naturally instead of bunching up the cars via stage cautions just to get one or two laps of racing.
Also yeah while I don’t mind stages, it’ll be much easier to watch NASCAR without those competition cautions at the end of the stages as it could cause the race to get exhaustingly long, plus without set cautions it encourages different strategies from every teams on tires and fuel management.
Adding stage cautions back won’t fix the problem, it’s purely on the Next Gen car. Nascar refuses to address the elephant in the room with what a lack of horsepower, wider tires, bigger brakes, gear ratios and more have done to the quality of the racing product, especially at Short tracks and road courses.
It seems to make more sense to keep the stage cautions for road courses and if you do take them out do it for the ovals.
Keep stage cautions! It allows the teams to adjust their cars more through the race for more closer/exciting racing…