NASCAR: Larson's Celebration Not Viewed As Excessive
NASCAR has been more vocal as of late in regards to drivers going overboard when celebrating wins on the track. On Sunday Larson did some damage to his No. 42 machine while celebrating and some wondered if NASCAR would step in.
On Monday Steve O’Donnell, NASCAR executive vice president and chief racing development officer, said on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio that the celebration was not viewed as excessive.
I think it’s something that we’re continuing to look at, but, in this case, it was the guy’s first win, it’s been three years, he was ecstatic. I think we were part of the fan group in terms of looking down and saying that was awesome to see and an awesome moment. I chalk this one up as more of that. The car passed post-race inspection. It will certainly go to the R&D Center, but I look at this one as it was a first race win and someone really out there celebrating as they should.
A few week ago on Sirius XM NASCAR radio O’Donnell talked about the uncomfortable trend of more and more drivers damaging their cars while celebrating wins. O’Donnell spoke about how in the future NASCAR must put some procedures into place to assure the cars are not being damaged to where they cannot pass inspection after a celebration.
It’s a trend we don’t like to see. We want to see a celebration, and we think that drivers can celebrate without doing that. So, you’ll probably see us sooner than later put something in place that covers us for that as you kind of head into the last quarter of the season.
Again not there yet. We’re talking to a lot of the teams about it, but I think everybody is on board with the direction we want to go in
There have been moments in the past where fans have questioned drivers for appearing to damage their car with intent after winning a race. It makes sense that if a winning car was doing something not on the up and up, damaging the car after the fact and before post-race inspection would help obscure whatever they were doing.
Of course, NASCAR fans say a lot of things and while this might have happened before, it’s certainly not something that is plaguing NASCAR today. Regardless, there is no reason not to have some sort of a rule in place to prevent such things from possibly happening.
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