NASCAR defends Brickyard 400 overtime finish

NASCAR defended its overtime procedures and how the Brickyard 400 concluded Sunday at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, a race where Kasey Kahne won in the second overtime when a caution came out just after he had crossed a predesignated spot on the track.

As Kahne led Brad Keselowski down the backstretch on the second-to-last lap, a multi-car accident occurred behind them. At the time of the wreck, Kahne had not crossed the overtime line, meaning the race would’ve been restarted had NASCAR immediately called for a caution.

But officials waited to see if the damaged cars would clear the track, and when Denny Hamlin and others involved didn’t, NASCAR put out the yellow flag — at which point Kahne had crossed the overtime line. That ended the race with Kahne declared the winner.

“We have always said we’re going to make every attempt to finish the race under green,” said Steve O’Donnell, NASCAR executive vice president and chief racing development officer. “To do that, you have to see what happened with an incident. In this case, we did that.

“Once we decided to dispatch emergency equipment and knew there was oil on the racetrack, we threw out the caution. And ultimately that’s the end of the race.”

Had the yellow flag come out, the race would’ve needed to be stopped to clean up the oil on the track. But NASCAR may not have been able to restart because of darkness. A late start time (2:30 p.m. ET) plus a nearly two-hour delay for rain along with an inordinate number of cautions (14 for 55 laps) had the Brickyard 400 contending with the 9:07 p.m. sunset, a problem considering Indianapolis doesn’t have lights around the 2.5-mile track.

“We would not have been able to restart that race,” O’Donnell said. “There was oil down. It would have been another red flag. We were up against it.”

Afterward, drivers said the conditions were fine and they actually had better visibility in the closing laps than earlier. That would’ve changed had the race continued into another overtime period.

“It was actually worse when the sun was setting in [Turns] 3 and 4,” said Ryan Newman, who finished third. “You couldn’t see the wall in Turn 3 when the sun was setting.”