NASCAR Senior VP reacts to wet weather at Loudon

Elton Sawyer, NASCAR senior vice president of competition, speaks to Alex Weaver about the wet-weather tires at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.

Transcript

00:00Alex, we were here in the garage at New Hampshire Motor Speedway with the senior vice president

00:03of competition, Elton Sawyer, for NASCAR, and we have seen these wet weather tires at

00:08Richmond to start a race, but I don't know if we've ever seen them take place in the

00:12middle of a race, especially after a long red flag.

00:14What did you guys learn this afternoon and this evening?

00:16Yeah, Alex, if you go back, and Mr. France's vision for the wet weather tires was to get

00:22a race started on time, which we did yesterday with the Xfinity cars, and today, if we had

00:27a rain delay, which we did, to get back racing as quick as we could, and we were able to

00:31accomplish that, huge success today, you know, shout out to Goodyear, to our race teams,

00:38everyone working together, and our fans that stayed around today to see, you know, 300-plus

00:43laps of racing, which is what they paid for.

00:46Can you walk me through a little bit of the inside of NASCAR making the call to put the

00:50tires on, to wait out the rain delay?

00:52What did this afternoon look like as far as you guys working together to make that call?

00:56Yeah, if you looked at the weather when it came in, we knew we were going to get that

01:00band of rain that came through, but behind it, it looked really good, so we were just

01:05making the decision based off the information we had in front of us, and it looked like

01:08the, you know, the lightning was one of our biggest challenges, and once we got all that

01:13cleared up, we were able to go back racing.

01:15Finally, we saw NASCAR make the call with teams dictating when they came down Pit Road,

01:19they could keep wet weathers or slicks on.

01:21How did you guys make the decisions with the teams, but also take the teams' communication

01:26into effect here?

01:27Yeah, well, we used the collaboration with our teams as well as Goodyear, and we knew

01:31about the amount of laps we could go on the wet weather tires, and we're still taking

01:35baby steps with this whole program and wet weather tires and not wanting to put our teams

01:42in jeopardy on Pit Road and Pit Road being wet, so again, congrats to everyone that was

01:47involved, huge success.

01:49We'll learn a lot from this, and we'll apply that for the next time.

01:53Thank you, Elton.

01:54Yep, thank you.