Sunday’s Coke 600 was the longest NASCAR race in history — depending on how you measure
Joey Logano said Saturday he thought this year’s Coca-Cola 600 might be one of the longest races in the event’s 62-year history.
He was onto something.
One hour into Sunday night’s Coke 600, there was still a quarter left of the first quarter of the race. (About 25 laps of the first of four 100-lap stages.) By the time Denny Hamlin claimed the checkered flag at 11:49 p.m., 5 hours, 13 minutes and 8 seconds of race time had elapsed since the first green flag got things started at 6:25 p.m.
Sunday wasn’t officially the longest race in Coke 600 history — that honor belongs to the inaugural 1960 event that lasted more than 5 hours and 30 minutes. Nor was it the longest of the modern era, falling 44 seconds shy of dethroning the 2005 race and its 22 cautions (5:13:52).
It was, however, the longest race in NASCAR Cup Series history in terms of distance at 619.5 miles (413 laps).
It takes a long time to drive 600 miles, even at 175 MPH, but what caused Sunday to drag out as long as it did were the 18 cautions.
Last year’s Coca-Cola 600 had only four cautions across the entire marathon. By Lap 61 on Sunday, the track at Charlotte Motor Speedway had already caused the yellow flag to wave four times with three drivers exiting the race in Stage 1.
Laps 18, 32, 46 and 61 all had cautions thrown and none of them were caused directly by drivers making contact with each other. The only of the four that drew contact was the first caution, when Ryan Preece got loose and skidded into Turn 4 with Chris Buescher skidding in his tracks with the Nos. 15 and 17 cars slamming into each other; Noah Gragson was also caught up in the mess.
Preece was the only driver to exit the race during that caution, but by the time the race ended, only 18 of the 37 drivers who started the race finished it, and only Ty Dillon avoided having his name on a caution sheet.
The most spectacular wreck came during the final stage in Lap 346 and brought with it the red flag and an 11-minute stoppage.
Daniel Suarez, who won Stage 2, tried to move to the top of the track in front of Chase Briscoe but didn’t clear the No. 14, causing his No. 99 to spin and then get slammed by a skidding Buescher. That sent Buescher’s No. 17 Ford sliding out of control into the infield before the suspension collapsed underneath it, causing it to catch a loose spot on the artificial turf and roll four times before landing on its roof on the fifth revolution.
“Holy cow! That doesn’t look real,” Suarez’s Trackhouse Racing teammate Ross Chastain said over his radio when watching the replay on the video board at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
Buescher was trapped in his car for about five minutes before NASCAR officials were able to roll it over and allow him to climb out under his own power. He and Suarez were taken to the infield care center and released shortly after.
“Gonna be a bit sore tomorrow,” Buescher said. “ ... I haven’t been upside down in a really long time and was OK with that.”
Joining Buescher, Preece and Suarez on the long list of drivers who didn’t finish the race were Corey LaJoie, Josh Bilicki, Austin Cindric, Chase Elliott, William Byron, Kurt Busch, Brad Keselowski, Ryan Blaney, Bubba Wallace, Justin Haley, Harrison Burton, Austin Dillon, Noah Gragson, Kaz Grala, Cole Custer and Logano.
This story was originally published May 30, 2022 at 12:53 AM.
