Joey Logano advocates for stage cautions in road course races
Joey Logano is advocating for the return of stage cautions at road course races in the NASCAR Cup Series.
The reigning series champion isn’t a fan of NASCAR’s new strategy when it comes to their road courses. NASCAR’s decision-makers decided to do away with stage cautions for these types of tracks in 2023, believing that they made the race unnecessarily longer. Evidently, Logano wants to see them return.
Following Watkins Glen, which was one of the quickest races in recent memory, Logano explained his reasoning for his opinion on the matter.
“I like the stage breaks,” laughed Logano. “I don’t know if I’m against the majority or not. I kind of like having a caution to re-rack them and go again. I don’t know why we changed from what we were doing, and like, different than other places. Like I don’t know, to me it’s not manufacturing a race in any way. We all know the other caution is going to fall.
“It’s not like a mystery debris caution that wasn’t actually debris. That’s not this. It’s a real caution that is, it is announced, and we know when it’s going to be, and there’s plenty of strategy that we can play around those cautions, because we know it’s coming. Without the caution, it was pretty much cut and dry on what your strategy is going to be. Like here’s what it is.”
Moreover, Logano believes with how much harder it can be to wreck in the new car, NASCAR should do away with the lack of stage cautions at road courses, as the field simply needs them.
“The only way we really gained a few spots is because Chase Elliott ran out of gas, and drew a caution, and a few guys that haven’t pitted yet got screwed over. They didn’t get their track position back. That was all that happened,” added Logano. “Like I don’t know. To me, put the cautions in the race. We don’t wreck that much anymore. Cars don’t break that much anymore to where there’s just natural cautions.
“Like we’ll run that thing like an F1 race, all the way through.”
While the move was originally lauded, as cautions laps take forever on a road course, perhaps it isn’t working out as well as NASCAR hoped. Time will tell if the sport remains true to it’s decision, or if Joey Logano is able to convince decision-makers to switch it back.