When the ARCA Menards Series hit the track in Bristol last Thursday, the excitement across the garage was palpable. But just nine cars managed to finish on the lead lap. There is a lot of criticism around the standard that the semi-professional series caters to. And, with several cars being 10 or more laps down in Bristol, insiders are asking questions not only about the competitiveness of drivers but also why there isn’t a minimum speed one has to achieve before being allowed to race at tracks like Bristol.
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“Set a f****** minimum speed and enforce it,” said Freddie Kraft on the Door Bumper Clear podcast. “Like that’s what’s so hard about that? We do it in Cup. We do it every other series. Like I guess you wanna give these guys an opportunity, but it literally looks like the Richard Petty driving experience with ten cars out there.”
The Richard Petty experience was a reference to the times when there was no parity in NASCAR, and everyone pushed the limits, with the best drivers often being 10-15 laps ahead of the tail end of the pack.
Kraft, who serves as Bubba Wallace’s spotter in the Cup Series, was at the track on Thursday watching the ARCA race and saw one of the highest-ranked drivers go a lap down within lap three and eventually finish 21 laps behind the leader.
Japanese driver Takuma Koga, who is 5th on the points table this season, finished 24th in Bristol, 21 laps down from race winner Carson Brown, who is 11th in points.
“It’s always the most entertaining race of the year because there’s guys out there that have no business being on the racetrack,” said Kraft. “And I laugh about it, but it’s not right. I mean, like, the guys that are up front don’t get to race each other because all they’re doing, all race is dodging these pieces of s*** that are rolling around the bottom.”
Kraft’s point was that in a field of 35 cars, if the lead pack is constantly overtaking the backmarkers, pure racing for the lead is hard to come by. And the numbers tell an even worse story about the ARCA race in Bristol.
In the 200-lap race, nine drivers made it to lap 200, and a total of 29 drivers finished at least half the race distance. 29th-place finisher Con Nicolopoulos only completed 114 laps. Six drivers managed to finish just a lap down, while four other drivers finished within ten laps of the leader.
Koga wasn’t the only high-ranked driver who went several laps down. Isabella Robusta, who is third in points, was lapped 12 times; 6th-placed Alex Clubb ended his Bristol race 16 laps behind, and 10th-ranked Jeff Makoni finished 20 laps behind the leader.
If four of the top ten ranked drivers in the series finish more than ten laps behind the leader, then Kraft is right: they don’t belong on the race track, and ARCA should have a minimum speed, because the speed differential between the leaders and the trailing pack is too much.
“You’re running into some guy that’s running fifty miles an hour slower than you are. It’s frustrating to watch from a competitive standpoint,” said Kraft.
Tommy Baldwin, former competitions director at Rick Ware Racing, also added his own woes about the ARCA Menards Series.
“That’s why I don’t put Luke(Baldwin, his son) in there,” said Baldwin. “That’s why I will not. I don’t care, because you know why? Because the first five or six guys that are racing, it costs just as much to run those cars and race against them as it does to run a truck race. It doesn’t make sense to do that. What are you learning? ”
On Door Bumper Clear, RFK Racing’s No. 60 Ford driver Ryan Preece was the only one who showed a bit of support to those in the ARCA series, but he too said they need to be quicker.
“I’ll give the guys credit though,” said Preece. “At least those are home-built. They’re preparing their own cars, and they’re coming, and they want to race Bristol, I get it. I agree with you; it probably needs to be a little bit faster. So you’re not going ah a lap down every seven laps.”
ARCA Menards Series came into the NASCAR fray in 2018 and was fully integrated in 2020. It’s been six years, and ARCA, while it is semi-professional, is supposed to act as a stepping stone towards Truck, Auto Parts, or Cup drives in the future for young drivers.
But is there such an extreme divide between where the leaders are as opposed to the backmarkers; does it really serve the purpose of being a feeder series? Because competitive drivers come through competitive environments.