NASCAR official explains no-caution call for Cody Ware’s late crash at The Glen

NASCAR’s managing director for the Cup Series, Brad Moran, explained the decision behind race control not calling for a caution for a crash involving Cody Ware that left a big dent in the Turn 7 railing.

Ware was able to keep the car going, drove down pit road and tried to make repairs but the Rick Ware Racing No. 51 ultimately elected to park it. It became a talking point after the race, as television only showed Ware had damage, but no replays of what happened.

In-car replays after the race showed just how hard the impact was and how close Ware came to careening off the railing and back into oncoming traffic. “From what we knew, we weren’t going to put out an alert unless the #51 started shedding parts like it did driving away from the scene of the incident,” Moran said.

"We don't stop working on safety," Moran said Wednesday on his weekly appearance on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. “When we get an incident like this we go back and take a look and see what can change or what can be done differently.

“Just to give you a view from the tower, the 51 wrecked out of 6 there and at that point, NASCAR, we have a corner worker in turn 1 and one through the esses, one at the bus stop and one in turn 6 with our official radios and the track has all their local corner workers on a different radio with their official, who is in the tower as well.

“We have a local ‘blue’ when that incident happens or anytime there’s debris, during the time it is happening. The 51 made heavy contact and stopped near the tire pack at the restart zone. The warning didn't come out, he did drive away within seconds. “We weren’t going to throw it then unless stuff was falling off the car.”

NASCAR has some emerging technologies on the way that could eventually send a signal to race control whenever there is a significant impact triggered.

“Yeah we’re working with our safety team and the new ECU going in the car this weekend for the first time and it has a lot of different options and we’re looking at the solution where we can use our iDash system which is an incident recording device in the car, possibly signaling to the tower the significance of a hit which would be useful to us if we had that tool,” Moran said. “The ECU hasn’t even been in a race car yet…so we have our safety team that is the best in the business and they are working on a possible solution to get us more information with the new technology.”