Saturday’s NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race was, in many ways, a fairly standard affair. Corey Heim led most of the race but CR7 Motorsport’s Grant Enfinger took his second consecutive victory. However, hidden in this fairly normal race is a massive problem that NASCAR needs to fix immediately.
On lap 77, ThorSport rookie Connor Jones got into the back of the #42 of Matt Mills, sending Mills into the outside wall and out of the race in a ball of flames. As a result of the incident, Mills was sent to a local hospital and only released on Monday.
As cited by Jones himself shortly after the incident, the number of run-ins between the two drivers contributed to Jones sending Mills into the wall and to the hospital. While this act of intentional wrecking is completely unacceptable and absolutely suspension worthy, it is indicative of a much, much larger problem facing NASCAR’s third series today: driving standards.
It’s been a series-wide problem for a while now but the Truck series specifically has seen the most blatant displays of the lack of driving standards in modern day NASCAR.
None worse than the championship race of last year, a race that was under caution for nearly 50% of its running time. A race that saw all four championship drivers involved in an incident of some kind, including the two best drivers intentionally wrecking each other, taking themselves both out of the championship and drawing ire from every viewer, fan or driver.
This isn’t normal and is not a sustainable series for NASCAR. Any team that wants to develop a talent may skip the truck series entirely, as with Ty Gibbs, due to its reputation of being a glorified demo derby. This is likely to keep quality talents out of the series and only make these problems so much worse.
So, what’s caused this?
Unlike many issues in NASCAR nowadays, this arguably has one that can be clearly located and pointed out. In recent years, NASCAR has been following the trend of rookie athletes gradually becoming younger and younger and working their way through the ranks of the sport faster and faster. Meaning that teams and manufacturers will try and rush drivers up through all three series long before they have had the time to develop their craft and understand the magnitude of their actions behind the wheel of a racecar. For example, Connor Jones is only 18 years old and did not spend a full season in ARCA.
How can this be fixed?
Honestly, a way to fix this would be a culture change for NASCAR team owners and manufacturers. Since the early 2000s, team owners have been obsessed with finding their own young superstar to lock down early, such as a Jeff Gordon or a Kurt Busch type. As a result of this, any driver who shows promise in the lower series will be immediately rushed out to a higher level in an attempt to speed-run their development. This approach rarely works and only stands to create more incidents from drivers who are in too deep at this point in their careers.
Team owners need to realize that it’s okay for their rookie to enter the Cup series at 25 rather than 18, to allow them time to develop themselves further and also to allow them to mature more as people. An 18 year old behind the wheel of a 3,400 pound truck traveling 160 mph may not always be a good idea.
A way that NASCAR could enforce this, rather than just leaving it up to the teams, would be to increase their current minimum age for larger tracks but I don’t really see a situation in which this is likely to happen.
Ultimately, truck series driving standards have trended downwards in recent years, and this does need to be fixed. Even some diehard NASCAR fans do not watch truck races anymore due to the quality of the on-track product. If NASCAR wants the series to be it’s own step on the development ladder, then it needs to more heavily police the racing in order to make it actually enticing for teams to invest their time and money into.
Featured Image Credits: Patrick Vallely
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