Gordon's Gimmick Costs Him Points

NASCAR Gets Tough on Caution Tactics

FORT WORTH, Nov. 4 -- Robby Gordon hardly invented a new method of gaining a competitive advantage when he flung a piece of foam padding out his racecar's window to bring out a caution last weekend at Atlanta. Instead he drew on a rule-breaking tradition as old as stock-car racing itself and got smacked with an unprecedented fine to underscore the point that the days of ginning up cautions in NASCAR races are over.

Most NASCAR drivers applauded the announcement that Gordon, who got back on the lead lap and finished 10th in last Sunday's race at Atlanta, would be fined $15,000 and docked 50 points in both the drivers' standings and car owners' standings.

But the upshot of NASCAR's get-tough policy means that yet another eccentricity of stock-car racing -- albeit an underhanded one -- is falling by the wayside in this modern era of flag-to-flag broadcast coverage, in which drivers' every moves are captured by TV cameras.

Gordon denied throwing anything out the window when confronted by an NBC reporter at the close of the race broadcast. But NASCAR's review of the footage, as well as an inspection of Gordon's No. 7 Chevrolet immediately afterward, proved conclusive, according to NASCAR spokesman Jim Hunter.

Gordon isn't a contender for the 2006 championship, but Jeff Burton and Mark Martin are battling for the title, and each got hurt by the bogus caution flag, which came out with about 35 laps remaining. And that tends to affect how competitors view pranks like Gordon's.

Said veteran Sterling Marlin, who has witnessed about every on-track antic in 30 years of racing: "If you was leading the race and had it won, and the caution come out and you run third, you're going to be [angry] about it. But if you was running third and won the race, you're going to laugh about it."

Ken Schrader confessed to winning a race once by "creating a diversion." It was in a 100-lap race in Seattle years ago, Schrader recalled in an interview Saturday. He was leading on Lap 90, but his tires were fading and his top challenger was closing fast when the caution flag flew. Schrader figured he could get a big enough jump on the restart to hold him off for a few laps, but that wouldn't be enough. So during the caution he reached for the fire extinguisher that drivers carried in their cars in those days, pulled out the pin and stuck it between his legs. He bolted to a big lead on the restart, but the second-place car had crept into his rear-view mirror by lap 96. So Schrader hoisted the fire extinguisher up next to his car window while racing and set it off.

"The whole car smoked!" Schrader recalled with pride. "So he checked up [backed off] because he thought I was going to blow, but they didn't throw the yellow [flag] because I kept going full speed."

The stunt bought Schrader just enough time to roar to the victory.

Nearly every driver needs a caution at some point in a 500-mile race, whether to adjust the car's handling, change a tire that's going flat, get a splash of gas or, as was the case with Gordon, get NASCAR's "free pass" back to the lead lap as the front-runner among the cars one-lap down.

The ethical thing to do is wait for the next caution or pit under the green flag. But desperate drivers have been known to engineer their own caution by tossing out something that race officials will mistake for a potentially hazardous piece of debris.

"There's been times drivers carried stuff under their seat just to chuck out the window," Marlin said. "You could tape up some trash, make it look like a piece of lead and throw it out."

Adds former racer Brett Bodine, who now pilots NASCAR's pace car: "I've seen padded things with aluminum foil wrapped around 'em. I mean, you don't want anybody to miss it! If you're going to take all the time to throw it out of the car, you gotta make it shiny and pretty and catch the eye."

On short tracks, however, it's easier to bring out a caution by spinning somebody out.

According to the unwritten code of acceptable fake cautions, it's preferable to spin someone out who's a few laps down and not battling for the victory. And it's out of bounds to spin someone out on a giant oval like Atlanta or Daytona, where speeds approach 200 mph.

A man of true honor will spin himself out if he needs a caution. That's what Dale Earnhardt Jr. did at Bristol Motor Speedway in 2004, but the stunt backfired when he bragged about it over the radio, which is monitored by NASCAR officials, and ended up with a $10,000 fine and the loss of 25 points.

Alas, with NASCAR tracks blanketed with TV cameras, phony cautions are getting tougher to pull off these days. According to Schrader, drivers know their every move is subject to being freeze-framed from every conceivable angle. "Well, most of us know," he added. "Robby didn't."