NASCAR chief explains controversy at season-opening race

A senior NASCAR official has explained a controversial decision made during the Clash at Bowman Gray on Wednesday.

There was a moment of controversy when the race was stopped with about 35 laps of green flag running remaining for all cars to refuel – a decision made after it appeared that two cars ran out of fuel, with several others worried about their consumption.

Some crew chiefs and drivers complained that the decision favored teams who made the choice to go lighter on fuel and risk their races in the case of cautions (which did not count to the 200 lap total) extending the race.

Brad Moran, NASCAR Cup Series managing director, admitted that the decision to allow all cars to take a free stop for fuel was partly down to the number of cautions thrown in the race, which totalled 17 by the time the chequered flag flew.

NASCAR chief: We didn't have all the information

Moran said: “It’s the first time we’ve run that engine in an actual race with the higher horsepower, for one. So was our data totally accurate that we went into the race with? We believe it is. We’re still going to go through all of that.

“The teams should have had full tanks when they went out for the Last Chance or The Clash, which obviously leads us to think they didn’t have enough fuel in the cars when they started.”

He continued: “So what we were managing from our side is that we had way more cautions than we've ever had. We don’t have a pit road that you could just allow fueling at any time. We don’t have fire protection at every station, so just multiple layers.

“We were getting reports, where we obviously saw some of them run out of fuel, starting with (Larson) and we weren’t sure if there was a pickup issue; we didn’t have that information at the time so we allowed them to fuel.”

On the cautions, he concluded: "We had 35 green flag laps to go with all the no count cautions that we could have had. And we were trending pretty high at that point. So at that point, the decision was made that we didn't want that to be the entire story of how the race ended.”