Toyota Racing executive David Wilson still hasn’t gotten over the caution in the 2016 Championship race that led to Carl Edwards losing out on the championship.
Edwards was closing in on the title with just 15 laps to go but NASCAR threw a caution when a piece of a brake rotor came off of Dylan Lupton’s car. However, the car didn’t hit the wall and made it safely to the pit road. After the restart, Edwards collided with Joey Logano, thereby ending his hopes of the title win. Jimmie Johnson, meanwhile, made history with his 7th Championship win.
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Wilson didn’t like the fact that NASCAR threw a caution under such circumstances and still looks back at that race with regret.
“The one that haunts me to this day, and there is nothing even close, is Homestead 2016 and Carl Edwards’ championship loss. That was his championship, he was going to win the championship, but there was a bulls**t caution that was thrown at the end of that race because the race more or less had been decided.
“Here’s my silver lining: We raised holy hell with the sanctioning body over that incident. And I believe, if you were to plot on a graph the change in treatment of the way the sport was regulated during the course of the race, you could trace it to that singular event.”
Wilson believes that NASCAR’s subsequent decision to throw fewer seemingly arbitrary debris cautions was because of Toyota’s lobbying against such decisions. It came a little too late as Edwards missed out on the championship and he retired from Cup Series racing after the race.