Track limits was one of the biggest talking points coming out of the Cup Series race at the Circuit of the Americas and Trackhouse Racing boss Justin Marks believes that the answer lies in Moto GP. Marks has a team in the motorbike racing competition and believes that their approach to violating track limits should be adopted in the stock car racing competition, at least for COTA, so that a driver does not end up losing a huge number of places. And it could be something NASCAR adopts in future races at the track.

Justin Marks urges NASCAR to use the long-lap penalty rule for track limits

The 43-year-old recently spoke about the matter on SiriusXM Radio and revealed that he spoke with Elton Sawyer and Steve O’Donnell to introduce the concept of a long-lap penalty. COTA has an escape road at turn 13 which is a longer route around the corner. When a driver takes that road, they lose a bit of time and track position. So Marks suggested that instead of adding pre-determined penalties for track limit violations, NASCAR should make it so that the drivers in breach of the rules take the escape road as the penalty instead.

“One of the things that we do in MotoGP that I suggested to Elton Sawyer and Steve O’Donnell earlier today is when a bike breaks the track limit rule, every track has a corner where there is an escape road that runs a long way around the outside of that corner and they call that a long lap penalty. So when you get called for a track limit violation, on the next lap you have to make a long lap. So in that corner, you have to go and take that access road, the penalty is 3 or 4 seconds, and then you rejoin the race. COTA happens to be the only US Moto GP race and at turn 13 there is a long lap escape road so I pulled it up on Google Earth, I snapshot it, and I sent it to O’Donnell and Elton Sawyer and I said just make it a long lap penalty,” the Trackhouse Racing boss said.

It certainly would make things interesting, as the drivers would not be completely handicapped and would have control over their race. It has its own challenges, but as far as Justin Marks is concerned, it’s better than the method NASCAR uses to penalize drivers at COTA for track limits at the moment. One of the drivers that made him see that was Chase Elliott.

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The Hendrick Motorsports driver was penalized for cutting a corner, and their appeal was rejected by NASCAR as well. The incident took place with about 30 laps remaining, and it happened because the driver of the #9 car got loose and had to regain control of his vehicle. Unfortunately, since it happened at the esses, there was going to be no respite for the former Cup Series champion. Justin Marks was not a fan of this.

“I didn’t like the penalty on the #9 yesterday. Sometimes you are in situations where you almost can’t help it. I think the reason that we are in the track limits era is because the way that the new tracks are getting built. I mean the way that they are getting built is that they’re trying to make it safe, they are trying to mitigate safety here so we got big run-off zones, a lot of pavement. They don’t want cars spinning out and hitting things. They want cars putting it in gear and rejoining the race. So a lot of the new tracks that have been built around the world have the track limits element to them. You don’t see it at the classic F1 tracks, you don’t see it at really any of the other road courses here in the US,” he added.

The track limits issue left a sour taste in a lot of people’s mouths after the race in Austin and NASCAR will surely have to take a call on how to better handle it. It will be interesting to see what they can come up with.

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