Friday 5: Is more practice a path to reducing cautions in Cup races?

Brad Keselowski says that with what RFK Racing spends on simulation, he’d rather have NASCAR expand practice each weekend.

Keselowski also notes that extra practice would help teams learn the nuances of the Next Gen car. The more track time, the more teams could adjust and possibly reduce the chance for accidents.

The Cup Series has seen a 72.7% increase in number of cautions for accidents and spins in races this season compared to last year through the first 15 events.

There have been so many cautions this year that six races (40%) saw the winner not need to make a green flag pit stop. That includes the Coca-Cola 600, which had 18 cautions — 14 for accidents and spins — after having four cautions (one for an incident) last year.

“I think Cup racing had really matured to the point where we were going to racetracks and having zero cautions and nothing was happening,” said Keselowski, who is in his first year as co-owner of RFK Racing. “Now we can’t run more than 20 or 30 laps wherever we go. There has got to be a happy spot in the middle. 

“A full tire run is good every once in a while. … I think a lot of that stuff is a product of not getting the practice to get the cars right and being so reliant on all these other engineering tools that candidly are never going to be 100% accurate.”

NASCAR on NBC analyst Parker Kligerman, who ran his first race in the Next Gen car last weekend at World Wide Technology Raceway, noted how different the new car is for a driver compared to last year’s model.

“This is entirely different,” Kligerman said on MotorMouths this week on Peacock. “Throw away everything I’ve known for the last decade about driving stock cars and sort of just reset, start anew, and now I have got to figure out ‘How