At what point did NASCAR go from racing full-throttle at Superspeedways to considering fuel-saving and driving below the minimum speed to get to the next stage of the race? Veteran drivers Kenny Wallace and Ken Schrader have presented an honest and straightforward breakdown of NASCAR’s talk of the hour: the grid’s fuel-conserving strategy at the YellaWood 500 at Talladega.

But why do teams care about fuel saving when the race runs a distance of 500 miles? While Wallace represented the fan’s perspective, sick and tired of fuel-saving, Schrader went on to cut the drivers some slack and take a stand for the field.

On Thursday’s episode of the Herm & Schrader DirtyMo Media podcast, Wallace started the dialogue with: “The teams have figured this silly thing out. It is like fake wrestling. What they do is they go half throttle, and they cheat the fans out of a race. Denny Hamlin comes across the radio and says, ‘This is ridiculous; this is like one of those driving schools’. Roush Fenway Keselowski says this is horrible for the sport.”

Schrader then chipped in with his two cents, but contrary to popular opinion of despising the fuel-saving debacle, he calmly explained and backed the reason behind it.

“You know, the thing is, it’s a 500-mile race,” said Schrader. “So you get points at the end of Stage 1, and you get points at the end of Stage 2, and then it’s the first one to go 500 miles. They don’t say how fast you got to do it. You just got to do it faster than everybody else.

“The NASCAR community… all of them are very blessed to have Sunoco as the official fuel and also supplying everybody with fuel. So it’s not cost, I mean, the teams aren’t saving any money; Sunoco’s saving a little money. But the teams aren’t saving any money. They’re doing what they need to do to have the best chance to win the race,” argued Schrader in the defence of the drivers.

Schrader’s argument is relatively simple: teams and drivers are adopting such strategies to keep themselves alive in the game. With a title on the line and a couple of races to go, no driver in title contention would want to ruin their weekend by going against the rest of the field on such fuel-saving strategies and risk a potential incident only to walk away with a few points in stage one, or even worse, only to eventually end up sabotaging their entire weekend if the risk does not pay off.

NASCAR introduced three-stage racing in 2017 to facilitate all-out racing from drivers with the incentive of extra points in each stage.

However, in the Next Gen era, the decision has only fallen flat on its face, with three-wide, fuel-saving strategies draining the excitement out of racing on Superspeedways. Fans who are promised sensational action and drivers pushing themselves and the cars to the limit are met with handicapped races.

That’s where Wallace’s argument gains weight. While Wallace was amused by Schrader’s ‘how teams do not save any money by saving fuel; comment, he didn’t hold back from criticising how the new format is ruining the experience for bystanders and the grandstand audience.

A very animated Wallace added that the whole NASCAR community should be gathered, be looked in the eye, and told that they are doing a “disservice” to the sport they not only adore but also earn a living from. The former broadcaster made a bold remark, saying that the teams cheat the fans out of the race and are ruining the product for them, as The Athletic’s Jeff Gluck also pointed out this week.

While the two veterans presented their takes as it came to them, the paddock has also been voicing its opinion on the fuel-saving game plan.

What Drivers and Critics Said About Talladega’s Fuel-Saving Debacle

No.12 Team Penske driver Ryan Blaney called out the lifting-off-the-throttle racing on his radio, saying, “We’re going to be running a minute lap time before too long here.”

Blaney later elaborated on the Door Bumper Clear podcast, “I hate saving gas like that whole—literally the whole first stage. The only time we went hard in that first run was when the first group pitted… So for 50 laps, I rode around there like quarter-throttle. Lifting, it was… that’s painfu,l and you’re just counting laps… I still got 30 laps to go of doing this. Like, it stinks. I don’t know what the fix is.”

Drivers were running near-60-second laps around the 2.66-mile circuit, a baffling sight. Any decent street car can do that if driven right. But the problem isn’t new. In fact, it has become so ingrained over the last few years that Joe Gibbs Racing driver Chase Briscoe accepted fuel-saving as part and parcel of the NASCAR of today.

“It’s become a habit,” Briscoe said in Aug. 2025. “Even weeks where we don’t need to be, I’m saving fuel just for the sake of it because you never know what can happen, and it eventually adds up. That’s just been something I’ve really kind of burned into my mind over the course of the last couple of years in Cup racing, and it’s obviously worked out for us.”

Former racer Kyle Petty and veteran journalist Jeff Gluck were also amongst the many who criticised NASCAR.

Petty commented on PRN’s Fast Talk podcast: “I hate fuel saving. I’ve said it here before; I just hate it… I want them to run as hard as they possibly can. I thought we used to have a 100% rule.”

Jeff Gluck slammed NASCAR on “The Teardown” podcast with Jordan Bianchi by saying, “This extreme is not what people pay to see. I’m sorry, it’s not what people want to watch. It’s not what people pay to see; it’s not okay. You can’t just be like, all right, this is just how it’s going to be, how it is. You have to do something about it. You can’t just settle for it.”

While the vast majority expects NASCAR to find a fix, vice president of racing communications Mike Forde revealed that the officials considered black-flagging 75% of the field for running at minimum speed and issued a prompt warning to teams at pit road, which forced them to change their strategy.

In addition to Forde’s revelation, Cup Series Managing Director Brad Moran has also revealed that the officials are not very happy with stage one racing as a whole and will come up with a fix for the problematic new stage length next year.

While Moran has set the record straight by saying that fixing superspeedway fuel-saving is probably going to be their number one project in the off-season, the bigger question is whether NASCAR should adapt and improvise like the paddock, or should it rather come up with a tightly knit package with no open ends for drivers and teams to find loopholes and eventually rely on hard-racing as the ultimate strategy.