Richmond Raceway has become one of NASCAR's most unique tracks from a strategy standpoint. Due to the high tire wear, teams must pit and pit often, often having the choice to decide how many times they'll stop during a stage. But nowadays, it doesn't seem like it's much of a choice.
When stage racing began, most teams only pitted as often as they needed to for fuel, and the "alternate" strategy was to make an extra stop to try to gain ground on fresh tires. But in Saturday night's Cook Out 400, every team chose the extra stops, with little to no variance except for the gambles of Christopher Bell and a few others in the final stage.
It's predictable and boring, and it's bad for racing. The charm of a track like Richmond is supposed to be seeing cars slide around on old tires, and cars aren't sliding around on old tires, because they replace them every 40-to-50 laps.
Something must be done about it. And not the thing that everybody wants to be done.
Stages aren't to blame for the staleness of pit strategy; over-optimization is
Everybody always wants to blame stage racing for the lack of strategy in the Cup Series today, but aside from the road courses, it hasn't really had much of an effect. We saw that at Talladega Superspeedway this year, when NASCAR changed the stage lengths to limit fuel conservation, and everybody still spent the whole first half of the race saving fuel.
At a track like Richmond, stages have nothing to do with this effect. It's because every team in the garage has now realized they'll complete a run in less time by pitting more often than they need to, because the laps on fresher tires will make up for the time they lose in the pits.
You can't blame the teams. They're not going to do something less effective just because it's more interesting when different cars are on different strategies. Just like how every time we have a race come down to fuel mileage now, teams split the run in half so they can catch anybody who stays out, instead of running their tanks dry and pitting in the final few laps like they used to.
Still, there is a way to make life harder, and that's if NASCAR would limit the number of sets of tires teams can use in a race, the way they do in the O'Reilly Auto Parts Series and Craftsman Truck Series. This would force crew chiefs to make difficult decisions about how often they pit, and force drivers to do a better job of conserving their equipment on long runs.
Cup Series teams have cracked the code when it comes to pit strategy. It's time to throw a wrench into their formula.
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