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Almirola wins Xfinity race thanks to NASCAR's ill-timed caution decision

Nick Bromberg
College football and motorsports writer
Almirola (No. 98) was declared the winner of Friday's race (Getty).
Almirola (No. 98) was declared the winner of Friday’s race (Getty).

When you have a choice between two options, it’s not often that the best choice is to go halfway between them.

NASCAR went halfway at the end of Friday night’s Xfinity Series race. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work out.

When a caution came out on the final lap of the race for a crash on the backstretch, NASCAR elected to not throw a caution immediately after the crash (Option 1). Instead, the control tower decided to let Aric Almirola and Justin Allgaier duel for the lead as they raced towards the finish line (Option 2) .

Or not. NASCAR decided to throw the caution as Almirola and Allgaier exited turn 4 on the final lap. When NASCAR threw the caution, the leader was nearly indistinguishable. Was it Allgaier? Was it Almirola?

After a few minutes of suspense and some video dissection, NASCAR declared Almirola was barely in front of Allgaier when the caution came out.

We understand why NASCAR wants to be cautious – no pun intended – when it comes to late caution scenarios. The sanctioning body likes to do what it can to see races finish under green. But it also knows that if it needs to deploy safety vehicles to the scene of an accident, it’s unafraid to have a race end under caution. Joey Logano won the 2015 Daytona 500 after a wreck happened on the backstretch. The execution in these scenarios may be imperfect, but the goal is noble.

Friday night, the execution was much worse than imperfect. Just look at how driver Bubba Wallace classified it.

NASCAR was clearly being pragmatic by waiting to see how the accident on the backstretch would clear. Again, it’s shown with its race officiating that it wants to see races end under green flag conditions.

But that pragmatism has a shelf life of just a few seconds. Once Option 1 is fully off the table, Option 2 is the only other option, especially in a scenario such as this where the accident happened a mile away from the finish line.

Maybe clouded by the heat of the moment, NASCAR failed to recognize the situation it was in and reached for Option 1 way too late. And made a mess of the finish, forcing a mashup of replays to determine a winner rather than a potentially epic race to the finish line.

Or maybe NASCAR didn’t even see the crash clearly at all.

The caution lights came out approximately 19 seconds after the first car hit the wall on the backstretch. Allgaier and Almirola crossed the finish line approximately nine seconds after that. Had they been at full speed, that time would have been a couple seconds quicker.

If you’re going to wait almost 20 seconds to throw a caution, another seven to get to the finish line isn’t significant, especially when drivers have a mile to slow down before driving past the scene of the accident. And even if NASCAR didn’t see the crash clearly, it needed to realize that Option 2 was the only option on the table.

The cluster of Friday night is a compounded mess as well. At the previous Xfinity Series restrictor plate race in May at Talladega, NASCAR made the call to throw a caution immediately as a crash involving the leaders happened on the final lap in the tai-oval.

Brennan Poole crossed the finish line first, but since NASCAR said it called for the caution, the finish was then determined via replay. And Elliott Sadler — the driver whose bumper Joey Logano went careening off — was in first at the time of the caution. Sadler was declared the winner.

Had NASCAR followed the precedent it set in May and displayed the caution flag right away Friday night, it’s in an incredibly defensible and consistent position. It can simply say it’s doing what it did two months earlier in the name of safety.

Instead it attempted to get away from that precedent. And, perhaps realizing they made a mistake, the people in the control tower tried to find that consistency way too late.

By doing so, those people ensured that the only people who left the race happy were Almirola, his team and his fans. And they also reinforced the notion among many observers that the only thing consistent in NASCAR is inconsistency.

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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!