During the 1998 Save Mart/Kragen 350k at Sears Point Raceway, the 4th caution of the day took a long time as Jeff Burton clobbered the wall and NASCAR had to make a retrofit wall repair to keep the race going. Mark Martin and a few others pitted to make it the rest of the way on fuel. Then, a lap or two later, others came in. This scrambled up the running order. On a normal racetrack back then, the cars exiting pit road would stop at the exit by the lollipop man. Once the field passes, the lollipop man releases the cars and they would blend back in at the back of the queue.
However, the rule changed for road courses after the 1995 Bud at the Glen. Rusty Wallace ran in the back of Geoff Bodine when the field stacked up behind the lollipop man. So, for Sears Point and Watkins Glen, they let the cars exiting pit road to blend back in to traffic without stopping, even though not all of the field had passed pit road. This means that someone who would like to stay out would not get the benefit of track position if he was too far back in the queue and the drivers who pitted were able to get out of pit road fast enough.
This caused quite a confusion with everyone, even Benny Parsons and Ned Jarrett. Johnny Benson's crew chief Steve Hmiel was incensed and Ted Musgrave's crew chief James Ince agreed with Steve. Dr. Jerry Punch provided NASCAR's explanation, but there still seemed to be confusion. Mike Skinner's crew chief Larry McReynolds and Mark Martin's crew chief Jimmy Fennig came to the NASCAR official as well, upset at the situation. It was nice audio from ESPN for a while until Jimmy let out a f-bomb then they quickly went to commercial.
The race restarted in the same order as it was before the commercial. There was no follow up from what I can tell on the incident, but I'm sure crew chiefs like Steve Hmiel and others were very upset that nothing changed. A very interesting storyline and soundbites from 1998.
Race uploaded by jinjabreadman46. Video is for awareness purposes only. All credit to NASCAR and ESPN.
