Colton Herta has as many IndyCar victories as his father. Alexander Rossi cough up more points. IndyCar showed patience with the yellow flag. The Indianapolis 500 will have 40% capacity... or 135,000 spectators. Formula E announced the remainder of its schedule and had a blunder of a race. Formula One has a contract to race in Miami. Reminder, we are currently in the ninth year of the ten-year contract with the Weehauken, New Jersey race. How is that going? Ken Roczen blew another opportunity. Joey Logano had a scare. Suzuka's 130R again proved to be hair-raising. Here is a rundown of what got me thinking.
Fixing the Criteria
The biggest news entering NASCAR's Talladega weekend was who was not going to be there.
After it was previously announced Jennifer Jo Cobb would make her Cup Series debut at Talladega driving for Rick Ware Racing, NASCAR announced six days before the Talladega race Cobb would not be approved to compete at the 2.66-mile oval. Rick Ware Racing put J.J. Yeley in its #15 Chevrolet instead.
NASCAR not approving drivers to run on the superspeedways of Daytona and Talladega is nothing new. It has long required drivers to run lower division races at those tracks before approving them for competition in NASCAR's series. However, Cobb was not some inexperienced driver hoping to run a Cup race, and after other drivers had been approved to compete, Cobb's rejection raised a few eyebrows.
Cobb has made 217 NASCAR Truck Series starts, tied for 13th all-time in that series, and she has started every Truck race this season. She has started 16 races at Daytona and Talladega in a truck, including at Daytona earlier this season where she completed all 101 laps and finished 18th. She also led 16 laps at Talladega last year. Cobb has also made 31 starts in NASCAR's second division, but her two starts at Daytona were in 2010 and 2011 and she ran at Talladega in 2011 and 2018. Her 2018 Talladega appearance is her last start in the second division.
Her performance also does not scream Cup talent either. Her only top ten finish in the Truck series was sixth at Daytona in 2011. She has only 11 lead lap finishes in 217 truck starts and has zero lead lap finishes in 31 starts in NASCAR's second tier.
While I do not believe Cobb is qualified to race in the Cup Series, NASCAR has already set the bar at a level where she should have been allowed to compete this weekend at Talladega.
Derrike Cope drove that same #15 Rick Ware Racing Chevrolet in the Daytona 500 and while Cope was the 1990 Daytona 500 winner, he had not competed in a Cup races since 2018. His last start on a superspeedway was the July 2015 Grand National Series race at Daytona where he completed only 15 laps. He had not run a superspeedway in the Cup Series since October 2006 at Talladega and since that Talladega race Cope had only made 19 Cup starts in 15 years. Cope has not had a top ten finish in any of NASCAR's three national touring series since he was fifth in the 1997 Cup finale at Atlanta.
There comes a point where Cope's success from over 30 years earlier no longer fills the requirement for eligibility in 2021 and Cope isn't the only driver that set a precedent that should have allowed Cobb to compete.
Mark Thompson ran the autumn 2017 Talladega Cup race and started the 2018 Daytona 500. His Daytona 500 start came when he was 66 years old. His only Cup start prior to that was at Pocono in 1992. His only four starts in NASCAR's second division all came between 2015 and 2017 and all four were at either Daytona or Talladega. In two of them, he retired about halfway through due to an engine failure.
Thompson never ran a Truck race, but he was a regular competitor in ARCA at Daytona and Talladega. He was second in the 2010 ARCA race at Daytona and was fifth in that same race in 2012, but he had finished outside the top 25 in four of the five Daytona ARCA races leading up to his Daytona 500 debut. He had two top ten finishes in ten ARCA Talladega starts between 2007 and 2017. He wasn't lighting the world on fire in his senior years and yet NASCAR let him compete in its top division.
Cope and Thompson might be two older examples, but for the last few season the NASCAR Cup Series has had at least three or four drivers competing who arguably lack the résumé to be in the top series.
B.J. McLeod is running majority of the Cup races for Live Fast Motorsports in 2021, the team he co-owns with Matt Tifft, but McLeod has never had a top ten finish in 156 starts in NASCAR's second division. McLeod has never had top ten finish in his 40 Truck starts. McLeod made his first Cup superspeedway start in the 2019 Daytona 500. Going into that race he had one Truck start at Talladega in 2011, but he had four Daytona starts and two Talladega starts in NASCAR's second division. His average finish in those six races was 27.667 with three retirements. He was in the top twenty for only two of those races, but he was 11th in the July 2017 Daytona race.
Joey Gase has made 77 Cup starts since 2014, but in 244 Grand National Series races he has one top five and three top ten finishes. That top five was at Talladega in 2015 and he was in the top ten for both Daytona races in 2017. However, his overall record in that series is not too dissimilar to Cobb's Truck record. Gase has only 28 lead lap finishes in those 244 starts. His career average finish is 27.3. Gase has also only made four Truck starts and one ARCA start at Iowa in 2010. Gase's first superspeedway race was the 2012 season opener for NASCAR's second division at Daytona.
Quin Houff had ten starts in NASCAR's second division when he made his Cup debut in 2019. Houff had two lead lap finishes. His only superspeedway starts were at Daytona in ARCA and he was in accidents in both of them, leaving him with finishes of 27th and 32nd. Houff is in the middle of his second full season in Cup.
Even Corey LaJoie has a questionable path to his current spot in the Cup series.
LaJoie's career at a-glance:
2012: Second in the NASCAR East Series with five victories
2013: Three victories and four top ten finishes in five ARCA starts. One start in NASCAR's second division
2014: Two Truck starts and one NASCAR second division start before he made his Cup debut at Loudon. He would run four more races in the second division and the Cup race at Charlotte
2015: Two NASCAR Modified starts and one NASCAR East Series start
2016: Ten NASCAR Second division starts, including the July Daytona race, the first superspeedway race of his career. Two top ten finishes, a tenth at Bristol and sixth at Dover
2017: 32 NASCAR Cup Series starts, including his Daytona 500 debut. Six starts in NASCAR's second division. It is the last time LaJoie has run in one of the two lower national touring series
Since 2018: 106 Cup starts with four top ten finishes and he is competing in his third full season.
LaJoie had a good year in 2012 in the East Series, but outside of that, what did he show to become a regular Cup competitor in 2017 after only 18 starts in the lower two divisions and basically taking all of 2015 off?
It is odd to see a driver such as Gase be allowed to dive straight into a race for NASCAR's second division at Daytona when he was 19 years old and yet six years earlier, IndyCar champion, Indianapolis 500 winner and Formula One grand prix winner Juan Pablo Montoya had to run the ARCA race at Talladega before he was to be approved to run at Daytona for the start of the 2007 season. IndyCar champion and Indianapolis 500 winner Dario Franchitti had to do the same thing the year after that. Even Danica Patrick had to run the 2010 ARCA race at Daytona before she could compete at Daytona in NASCAR's second division.
NASCAR should have a minimum-criteria for competition, but over the last decade it has clearly changed and not been as consistently applied to all drivers attempting Cup races.
James Davison was also not approved to compete last year at Talladega and one of the reasons cited was the lack of practice, which is one of the same reasons Cobb was not allowed to compete. If that is the case then for the sake of competition NASCAR must do one of two things, either bring back practice for the superspeedway events or NASCAR needs to have a rookie orientation test session like IndyCar does every season.
To compete on an oval in an IndyCar, a driver has to complete rookie orientation, and this is not Indianapolis 500 rookie orientation. In recent years, Texas Motor Speedway has been a place for these tests. Ahead of the 2020 season, rookies Rinus VeeKay, Oliver Askew, Álex Palou and Scott McLaughlin all completed their rookie test at Texas.
If NASCAR is going to continue to have practice-less weekends, it must at least give rookie competitors a chance to prove they are capable of competing at these tracks. NASCAR needs to have a rookie test ahead of the season at Daytona and allow anyone who hopes to compete in the superspeedway races earn approval. One test needs to be ahead of Daytona and there could possibly be one ahead of the first Talladega race.
This would just be a limited test for drivers who need approval, not a free-for-all with 40 cars and full-time drivers participating. It would be two opportunities to get approval early in the season. If a driver does not compete in either of these tests, and NASCAR does not feel that driver is fit to run superspeedways then that driver will have to wait until the following season for approval.
Superspeedways aside, it is time for NASCAR to publicly state the minimum standard to compete in the Cup Series. Majority of the drivers in the top division have unquestionable qualifications, but the standard is for those final four or five drivers on the grid who may or not be ready to enter the top division.
I don't want NASCAR to fully embrace an FIA Super License point system model because that would possibly prevent the likes of Austin Cindric and Harrison Burton from sampling the Cup Series while competing full-time in the second division. It also gets tricky when taking into consideration drivers that are coming from different disciplines and that was a frequent thing in the 2000s and early 2010s. It is difficult to weigh one series results over another.
The door should be left open a little for the top young drivers and be flexible for drivers switching disciplines, but the minimum standard should weed out drivers who otherwise are not ready for a Cup seat and raise the bar higher than its current level.
Winners From the Weekend
You know about Colton Herta, but did you know...
Kyle Kirkwood and David Malukas split the Indy Lights races from St. Petersburg. Braden Eves and Christian Rasmussen split the Indy Pro 2000 races. Christian Brooks swept the U.S. F2000 races.
Nyck de Vries and Jake Dennis split Formula E races from Valencia.
Brad Keselowski won the NASCAR Cup race from Talladega. Jeb Burton won the rain-shortened Grand National Series race, his first career victory in the series.
Tomoki Noriji won the Super Formula race from Suzuka, his second consecutive victory to open the season.
Marvin Musquin won the Supercross race from Salt Lake City, his first victory since Seattle 2019.
Sébastien Ogier won Rally Croatia, his second victory of the season.
Coming Up This Weekend
May begins with an IndyCar doubleheader at Texas.
GT World Challenge America will also be in Texas, Austin specifically, for a doubleheader.
Formula One has another Portuguese Grand Prix.
MotoGP heads to Jerez.
The FIA World Endurance Championship opens its season at Spa-Francorchamps.
Supercross concludes its season in Salt Lake City.
Super GT has a 500km race at Fuji.
NASCAR is in Kansas.
