NASCAR explains lengthy caution near end of Road America race

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For fans that questioned why NASCAR went six full laps under caution late in Saturday's Xfinity Series race around the massive four-plus mile Road America track, there's a very good explanation.

NASCAR Executive Vice President & Chief Racing Development 
 Officer Steve O’Donnell announces the indefinite suspension of 
 driver Kurt Busch at Daytona International Speedway on February 
 20, 2015 in Daytona Beach, Florida. 
(PHOTO: Patrick Smith/Getty Images)

NASCAR Executive Vice President and Chief Racing Development Officer Steve O'Donnell said Monday morning on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio the lengthy caution was a culmination of a number of circumstances. "You never want to have to red-flag a race," O'Donnell said. "So if you can avoid that, keep the cars or trucks moving out on the track and do that in a reasonable amount of time, that's always our first goal. If you look at Road America, we had a car get off into the sand pit (Ben Rhodes), we thought that would probably take two laps. You have a long course there with over four miles, so we thought that was plenty of time to get that vehicle off the track, allow for the pit cycles as well. As we were coming to one to go, multiple times we had incidents on the track with either vehicles stalling and we had oil put down with another vehicle coming off pit road that stopped the one-to-go. It was kind of a chain of events that you cannot predict, unfortunately. 


"You never want to have a caution that long, but it was one of those that each (incident) would have brought out an individual caution flag and a red in that time frame would almost cause more damage because it would have been down for longer." 

O'Donnell also said NASCAR has considered adding another road course race to the Truck Series, and the central Wisconsin track - which has proven to be a very popular venue for the Xfinity Series - would likely be on the short list of potential candidates.