Following a post-race audit of the Delta Heating and Cooling 175 on Saturday night at Wake County Speedway, CARS Tour officials confirmed Conner Jones as the winner but there were some changes that needed to be made from the provisional rundown.
For example, Sam Butler is now the runner-up after originally being scored as sixth and one lap down, which makes sense because he was told by race control to race on the lead lap at the end.
The R&S Race Cars No. 16 even crossed the line in second and that discrepancy from the transponders were immediately recognized by everyone at the track that night. CARS Tour basically reconstructed the race over the past 24 hours according to executive director Kip Childress.
“We were approached by them at the end of the race because they felt like they finished second, and certainly crossed the line second,” Childress told Short Track Scene. “As we rechecked our notes, they should have been in second, even though our timing and scoring did not reflect that.
“That one was pretty simple to recreate and find out why. The 16 was a beneficiary of the free pass on multiple occasions towards the end of the race throughout all the caution periods we had.”
For some reason that they still need to determine why, the final free pass was not recorded digitally, even though it was credited manually. Butler was told to drop to the back of the lead lap cars and race accordingly.
To recreate the race, Childress, race director Danny Willard and chief scorer Lee Watson utilized the FloRacing broadcast, Adam Zirkle Performance Technologies footage and the Orbits software used as part of the transponder process.
Confirming Co. Jones’ win
Meanwhile, Conner Jones was confirmed as the winner because he never officially lost a lap. He ran out of fuel under caution after the completion of 166 laps. The field took the green again with 166 laps completed and reached 167 laps completed at which point another caution came out before reaching 168 laps completed, meaning the running order reverted to the previous lap completed, 166.
This is standard operating procedure for the CARS Tour even if it ran into a unique circumstance on Saturday.
“The next time we may see this situation could be two years from now or two weeks from now in Nashville,” Childress said. “So, the one thing we want to make sure that hopefully everyone understands, is that a completed lap is not complete until the next lap begins.”
Jones was also not penalized for stopping on the track because the caution was already out for Landon Huffman and Treyten Lapcevich running out of gas. He didn’t trigger the caution and this was not a scenario they penalize drivers for, failing to come down pit road when they otherwise could have.
Fuel mileage racing
Because there were so many cautions, and caution laps don’t count, numerous contenders ran out of fuel and contributed to the final results.
Childress said the decision was made to not call the field down to refuel because of the response from teams when that decision was made during a 2023 race at Tri-County Motor Speedway.
“In that race, we had cars running out of gas, and during the closing laps, we elected to bring them down pit road and let them add fuel,” Childress said. “At that point in time, we had several teams that claimed they were on a strategy to be good to go and didn’t need to stop for fuel, and that we took that strategy out of their hands.
“So at that point in time, we took the stance that we were going to stay out of that part of it. In our desire to add laps to this race, because it is at a smaller track, and doing the math on it … if we have our normal amount of cautions, we should be well and good to go.
“So now, what we talked about in our staff meeting this morning, is that if we get into a situation, and it’s up to us to identify this, where have an abnormally large amount of cautions, the we want to make the call early to go ahead and recognize that a fuel stop needs to be made and take that element out of the equation.”
Cl. Jones penalty
Clay Jones was black flagged from the lead before the final restart for failure to address the damage on his car.
Jones did try to drive up against the wall to flatten the damage but Childress said the Markham Enterprises No. 1 started to ignore overtures from the tower.
“I hate it for Clay,” Childress said. “I know they’re a small team. I know that they’re a local hero there at Wake County and we don’t want to be in the middle of that any more than they want us to be but when the damage first happened and we saw it flapping around, our biggest fear was that piece ending up in the grandstand.
“So we started telling them right away to bring it in and get it cleaned up, and they just failed to do so.
“When we noticed the damage, we relayed the information to the spotter to get the car in and clean it up and did so for a number of laps until we weren’t getting any response from them so we displayed the black flag.
“We recognize Clay was trying to take care of it on the race track, and we’ve seen that happen at different levels of the sport, but the fact of the matter is that we had already asked them to come down and clean it up.
“We displayed the black flag because they were disregarding the call from the tower more than anything.”
Childress said they could have contended for the win, still, had they just pitted to repair the damage and returned to the tail end of the lead lap.
Mini v Barnes
Childress also said CARS Tour would have conversations with both Mini Tyrrell and Doug Barnes Jr. for their on-track actions during the race while racing for the lead.
“That’s a super unfortunate scenario between those two teams because they had the two best cars of the field and very well could have battled for the win,” Childress said. “One of them should have ended up in Victory Lane if they hadn’t wrecked.
“It’s so unfortunate that both of them found themselves, not only nudging themselves out of the way, but the contact in 3 and 4, where Mini got up over the left rear of Doug, and then the subsequent contact between them that spun Mini out.
“We’ll be having some discussions with those teams before we get to Nashville. There was an opportunity for us to intervene at that point and make a statement to them and the field that this is not something we are going to tolerate and frankly we missed that opportunity (in real time) and if we could do it over again, should have made a bold statement to pass that message along to the competitors in regards to that incident.”
