NASCAR senior vice president of competition Scott Miller accepted that they were wrong about Chase Elliott’s communication issues at Kansas.
Elliott had to face difficulties in the first race of the Round of 8 at Kansas Speedway. And it seems that his use of hand gestures was supposedly illegal. However, the No. 9 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet driver escaped further punishment.
Addressing the issue, Miller said:
“We were made aware of that, and we have a lot going on in the tower and we can’t monitor every single radio transmission from all the teams, but we do keep tabs on that.
“We did get word that there was some potential problem at the first pit stop. When we listened to some of the dialogue back and forth on the scanner, it seemed as though Chase was communicating with his crew chief about the car and there was some dialogue back. We felt like they were in communication with one another. We were wrong about that.”
The officials were not aware of the communication issues but now there’s nothing they can do about it.
“Most of the times when we have brought people in, it, ironically, has been because they’ve had either a speeding on pit road, some kind of pit road infraction or some other infraction and we communicate to the spotter to bring the driver down pit road and there is no response,” Miller added. “That’s when we typically become aware of a radio problem. In those cases, when the driver doesn’t respond to what the spotter is asking him to do, we always make them come down and fix it.”
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