“Ross Chastain woof”
So read the text, more or less, from a friend this morning at 4:40 AM. Jet lag, as they say, is a hell of a drug.
Ross Chastain did a hilarious thing yesterday, and also a really hard thing, and I’ve talked more with laypeople about NASCAR in the 24 hours since than I’ve talked with laypeople about NASCAR since Daytona, so let’s dig in. First off, here’s what he did (wait for it, also I haven’t read the tweet or listened to the audio yet so if there’s anything offensive, disavow):
Another angle:
What did you just watch?
Well, that’s the question.
For a little backstory on Chastain: The guy first really caught our heart last summer at Sonoma, when there was a wreck in a little buttonhook turn and Chastain, “to avoid it,” just cut across the buttonhook, gained half a dozen spots, and NASCAR didn’t send him back. Sneaky man, that Ross Chastain. This summer, at Indianapolis, he tried something similarly cheeky, basically exiting the track and trying to do a Mario Kart shortcut on the final restart. That time, NASCAR slapped him, but safe to say we knew he was, as NASCAR blogger or something like that Steve Luvender said yesterday, “ungovernable.” Chaos, in a man.
For a little more backstory on Chastain: He comes from a family of watermelon farmers, and to celebrate wins, he stands on the roof of his car and smashes a watermelon on the ground, something funniest to me because it presumably requires someone to either bring a watermelon on a private jet every week or go to a local supermarket every week to obtain a watermelon. Do they have a backup? Seems risky, not having a backup.
For one last bit of backstory on Chastain: He’s broken through this year competitively, standing at times as NASCAR’s most successful driver of 2022 but, crucially, also accidentally (and maybe sometimes intentionally) running a ton of other drivers into walls. What can we say? The guy’s chaos. He’s done it in a bumbling way, so he hasn’t really taken on a villainous persona, but definitely gets his share of hate from the rest of the circuit. Probably deservedly. But HE’S ROSS CHASTAIN WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM HIM.
Ok, what happened:
In video games, you can sometimes do this thing where you just don’t take your foot off the gas, riding the wall all the way around and, because that friction is less than the friction your brakes apply, getting around the track faster. You kind of slide up smoothly(-ish) alongside the wall, merging into its lane instead of spinning out or sliding fast and hitting it hard, it’s a video game move. Last summer, Kyle Larson tried it at…Darlington? I forget. Anyway, he tried it, and it destroyed the car, and it almost worked, but he didn’t end up gaining any places. That was the first time I’ve seen it tried in real life. This was the first time I’ve seen it work.
In Chastain’s case, he needed to gain two spots to be sure of a spot in the Championship Four, the final drivers standing in NASCAR’s chase for the season championship. He got two spots with the move. It was not only dramatic and hilarious, but it was also consequential, which only further fueled the fire. Him doing this for two meaningless points would have been funnier, of course, but this was great too.
The obvious question now is: Why doesn’t everyone do this? It’s a great question, and I think it’s the biggest one coming out of this, tied with: Is everyone going to do this next week? Clearly, it causes a lot of damage to the car, so you can only really do it on the last lap. Also, it subjects the driver to more G-forces than is customary, because normally the G-forces can only go so high before the tires themselves lose grip. Bubba Wallace’s old crew chief estimated Chastain took on 5.2G, and with plenty of shaking in addition to that. As the friend who texted me at 4:40 AM pointed out, Tom Cruise did double that in Top Gun: Maverick, but as I replied, can you imagine being half as cool as Maverick? It’s not the highest number of forces in the world, but at other tracks, it might be higher. There’s also, as Joey Logano pointed out, risk for fans next to the fence, and for the driver if the car gets caught on part of the wall, and for the universe if there’s a wormhole in there somewhere and we accidentally send Ross Chastain back to biblical times armed with a stock car. Perhaps most importantly, it can’t work if too many drivers are doing it. It’ll only lead to carnage.
So, there are limits. Which is why it was such a cowboy move.
**
Beefier notes tomorrow, or so we intend. Viewing schedule tonight:
8:15 PM EDT: Bengals @ Browns (ESPN)
They rained out the World Series game, so let’s all appreciate the NFL putting the two orange teams on Halloween night. Those guys don’t miss.
