NASCAR officials admit Edwards was put in wrong position in Nationwide race
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – For the second time in recent weeks, NASCAR officials admitted to lining up drivers in the wrong order on a final restart. In Friday night's Nationwide Series race at Daytona International Speedway, Roush Fenway Racing's Carl Edwards was lined up fourth for the green-white-checkered restart that followed a late-race accident.
Then NASCAR officials ordered him to forfeit a position to Richard Childress Racing's Clint Bowyer prior to the green flag. The team was arguing the call when the Winn-Dixie 250 was restarted. With chaos and confusion already surrounding the team, Edwards tried to block Mike Bliss on that restart, got into the side of him and slid off the track for a final finish of 11th.
"It was just a mistake on NASCAR’s part," Edwards said shortly after the race. "Hopefully they will apologize for it, but I’m supposed to be in front of Clint on the restart … I’m just very frustrated with all the technology we have, just because I went out in the grass to avoid the wreck, I was always at least 50, 100 feet in front of Clint and they couldn’t figure out that I was supposed to be in front of him. I’m just very, very frustrated about that."
Edwards praised his team's effort to get him to the front and in leading laps, but the effort was sidelined by the scoring error.
"It’s just too bad when something like that happens and it takes you back and messes up your race when it’s just a scoring error," Edwards said. "So hopefully they’ll figure out what’s going on so this doesn’t happen to these teams anymore. They don’t deserve it. My guys worked really hard tonight."
The problem started with the wreck that caused that final caution. Nationwide Series Director Joe Balash said that in avoiding the crashing car of Colin Braun, Edwards' car went into a position where it wasn't picked up by the scoring loop.
"The 60 car, when the incident occurred, had to come way below the yellow line to avoid the incident and he was below where the scoring loops were," Balash said. "When we back to the freeze the field position, we went back to the last hit on the loops."
The system places the car at the last crossed loop, so since it couldn't find Edwards' car, it reverted to the previous loop when he was actually behind Bowyer. He had passed Bowyer between the two loops. To figure it out, NASCAR needed to review video of the incident, which it did after the race.
"We had a situation with two cars on one of the cautions [recently] and one driver was adamant he was ahead of another driver and going back to the freeze the field, it was the opposite direction by .1 of a second," Balash said. "And so going by the freeze the field, we had (Edwards) repositioned, and we would have had to go back through the video and we didn’t see the video until after the race."
Brian Vickers was placed in the wrong position on a late restart in the Sprint Cup race at Michigan earlier this season, something NASCAR officials later apologized for. Both drivers felt that the placement of their cars cost them a shot at a win. And NASCAR, to its credit, is working diligently to make sure a similar issue doesn't crop up again.
"It’s an unfortunate situation, and we’re going to look at the positions of the scoring loops to see if we can’t make some alterations to it," Balash said.
