Tony Stewart steamed at another NASCAR ‘fake’ caution
“We did everything we could to throw it away; it got taken away," the defending Sprint Cup champion said. “I’m pretty ticked off about it."
Stewart, Columbus, Ind., had led four times for 118 laps and was out front when NASCAR called a caution for debris 12 laps from the finish. The leaders pitted, Kyle Busch beat Stewart off of pit road and easily handled the champion on the restart.
Stewart was annoyed with NASCAR over the caution, and his team for the slow pit stop.
“When the caution is for a plastic bottle on the backstretch, it’s hard to feel good about losing that one," he said. “And we gave it away on pit road. That’s the best car I’ve had at Richmond in a long time. But we’ve got some work to do on pit stops right now."
NASCAR has a history of throwing these 'debris' cautions at the end of a race to artificially close the field up for a tight finish. It's called managed racing. By bunching up the field toward the end it leads to many crashes and many retries at a Green-White-Checkered finish. And as a recent survey showed, the majority of NASCAR fans go to see wrecks. To a typical NASCAR fan, "if you ain't wrecking, you ain't racing."