This year’s NASCAR All-Star Race will feature something called a promoter’s caution. It’s exactly as ridiculous as it sounds: a planned yellow flag, thrown not because there’s a wreck, or debris, or a weather delay — but simply because someone in a polo shirt decided the race needed a bit more drama.
It’s halftime for horsepower. A smoke break for stock cars. And while yes, it’s only the All-Star Race, the mere existence of this gimmick should make every real racing fan squirm like a crew chief watching his driver choose the outside lane on a restart at Martinsville.
Now to be fair, NASCAR’s had plenty of rulebook curveballs over the years. Not all of them have been disasters. The Choose Cone? Clever. Playoff points? Keeps the season spicy. Even stage racing — controversial as it remains — at least has competitive implications across 36 weeks.
But the promoter’s caution doesn’t reward performance. It rewards the attention span of a fruit fly. It’s entertainment for entertainment’s sake — the motorsports equivalent of pausing a UFC fight halfway through and saying, “Let’s start over so nobody gets too far ahead.”
And again, I get it: this is the All-Star Race. The sandbox. The goof-off race where formats change every year, pit crews wear headbands, and Kyle Busch starts fights in three different lanes of traffic. It’s supposed to be chaotic.
But if this Frankenstein’s yellow flag ever sneaks into a points-paying race — if someone decides a Richmond snoozer or a Darlington grinder needs a mid-race breather — then we’ve officially stopped racing and started hosting a reality show on wheels.
And if that’s the game we’re playing, then I have some humble suggestions.
First, let’s introduce the Fan Vote Flamethrower. The winner of the fan vote gets a button that shoots harmless, yet glorious fire out of the rear bumper of the car ahead. Ratings gold.
Next up: the Mystery Pit Crew, where one randomly selected team is serviced by local high school teachers, two accountants, and a goat. Great for community outreach and utterly unpredictable.
Then there’s the Reverse Grid Raffle, in which a bearded man in a sparkly tux draws numbers on pit road and inverts the entire field because “why not?” Want to see Chase Elliott start last after leading every lap? Boom. Entertainment.
And finally, the pièce de résistance: Musical Chairs Restarts. At the beginning of the final stage, every driver exits their car and has 30 seconds to find another car. The first one to get into Ross Chastain’s car wins. Ross, of course, gets the pace car.
Look, I’m not against fun. But there’s a line between spectacle and farce, and NASCAR seems increasingly determined to high-step across it in clown shoes. The All-Star Race can absorb some of this nonsense — it’s built for chaos. But the second we see a promoter’s caution in a race that counts, that’s when we’ll know: the sport didn’t just jump the shark. It threw a caution so it could reverse back over it for the ratings.
Greg is the author of "The Nuts and Bolts of NASCAR: The Definitive Viewers' Guide to Big-Time Stock Car Auto Racing" and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, a Masters degree in psychology and is currently a PhD candidate majoring in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek.