Were NASCAR’s Five Overtime Restarts Too Many at Nashville? Uncovering the Fine Line Between Exciting Racing & Unhinged Chaos

The nineteenth race of the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series season saw drivers and teams go live from Nashville Superspeedway last Sunday. This year’s Ally 400 saw a flurry of caution flags and resulting overtime restarts at the end of what was expected to be a 300-lap-long race.

However, the event extended out to a total of 330 laps run in total by the winner Joey Logano. This final number emerged after considering the pace of laps drivers ran while yellow flags flew for various reasons on the track, adding 30 laps and almost 40 further miles of mileage to the race.

There were a total of five overtime restarts during the latter course of the race, the most in the history of the Cup Series ever. While the uninitiated might look at that number and shrug off the restarts as a lack of competency and respect between drivers, Sunday’s event and the resulting restarts were essentially a byproduct of strategic decisions made throughout the day.

Teams and drivers were seen running perilously close to their fuel windows of 80-85 laps during all three stages of the race. After Team Penske’s Austin Cindric set off the chain reaction by spinning out and the yellow waved for the first time, it was a case of dominos falling in sequence.

NASCAR insider Jordan Bianchi also spoke about how the caution flags were necessitated by consequences of genuine racing incidents and strategic calls instead of drivers making questionable decisions on a recent episode of The Teardown podcast.

“It wasn’t like these guys were doing stupid things after stupid things. This wasn’t a COTA situation where you’re like, ‘Oh my god, stop going five wide into the corner.’ I really wasn’t offended by this.”

The race that Bianchi referred to was the 2023 EchoPark Automotive Grand Prix at the Circuit of the Americas which saw drivers get stuck in a loop of overtime restarts after someone would spin out or crash as a result of hyper-aggressive driving by the field into turn 1 of the venue. This caused the fraternity to leave the track with a slightly sour taste in their mouth, with some also questioning the integrity of NASCAR racing.

However, yesterday’s first overtime restart after Cindric’s spin saw Larson get tight behind Denny Hamlin and wash up into Ross Chastain. The result was a spinning Chastain and the field re-racked for another restart.

Another subsequent restart saw Larson run out of fuel as several cars suffered the same fate, causing Kyle Busch to crash, bringing the yellow out yet again. However, almost no driver was accused of any unnecessary moves during this period.

The silver lining for the fans that need to be taken from the 2024 Ally 400 remains that sometimes things do go haywire in top-level motorsport. A race without the five cautions at the end would have been exciting in its own right.

Nevertheless, the five overtime restarts morphed what was an exciting race into a slightly unhinged but still exciting stock car racing event.