Richard Petty asserts fuel saving made superspeedway racing 'terrible'

Originally posted on FirstSportz | By Justin P Joy | Last updated 4/25/24

The Superspeedway races since the introduction Next-Gen cars has witnessed pretty clean racing, which uncharacteristic of the restrictor plate races. One of the major reasons for this has been the lack of intensity in the mid-part of the Cup Series races, due to fuel saving strategy employed by the race teams.

Seven times NASCAR champion Richard Petty , following last week’s race Talladega that saw clean stage one and stage two because of fuel saving. He was pretty disappointed how the race was played out and branded it as terrible. Petty even highlighted how the driver were slowing down once they secured the lead in the races.

It's terrible. They just got in line and they just run. They're trying to do a little strategy on doing the brakes and stuff like that and they just run. At one time, they were running 50 seconds and then when some of them guys got in front, they were running 55 seconds. Richard Petty said via Petty Race recap.

The race wasn’t a good one for Richard Petty, the team owner as well. His driver Erik Jones got wrecked in the Iconic No:43 car in an all-Toyota incident that was instigated by his teammate John Hunter Namecheck. The team has now been forced replace the driver for this week’s race at Dover with Corey Heim due to an injury he suffered at Dega.

Richard Petty asserts the race was nothing but a parade

Petty didn’t hold back on his criticism and pointed out that every racer slowed down to save the gas and there was just having a parade in the words of Erik Jones. He highlighted that no-one was really racing anybody on Sunday.

That's how much everybody slowed down, saving gas, doing the whole deal. So there was no racing. In fact, Erik came on one time and said, 'You know what, guys? I'm going to start waving at the grand stand because this is nothing but a parade.' Nobody really raced anybody. Richard Petty added.

Petty wasn’t the only racer to came out calling out the fuel saving. Many racing greates including Dale Earnhardt Jr. and veteran racer, Denny Hamlin and Kyle Busch was critical of the strategy. NASCAR has to come up with some big solution to end this Superspeedway issue.

This article first appeared on FirstSportz and was syndicated with permission.

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