The final day of NASCAR Nationwide Series testing at Daytona International Speedway was curtailed with roughly an hour and a half to go before the scheduled end point of 5 p.m. ET.
Chad Boat, who recently announced a part-time Nationwide program for this season, was quickest in the abbreviated afternoon session with a lap of 187.778 miles per hour in the No. 84 Billy Boat Motorsports Chevrolet.
However, that’s a couple miles per hour slower than Dylan Kwasniewski’s 190.022 mph lap he ran this morning, which will stand as the fastest lap throughout the Nationwide portion of Preseason Thunder.
The Camping World Truck Series drivers and teams are now set to have Daytona’s famous 2.5-mile oval to themselves for their Thunder test on Monday and Tuesday.
Boat was followed in the afternoon session by Kyle Larson’s lap of 187.703 mph in the No. 32 Turner Scott Motorsports Chevrolet. P3 went to Roush Fenway Racing’s Ryan Reed in the No. 16 Ford, which turned in a lap of 187.496 mph.
From the sanctioning body’s perspective, Nationwide Series director Wayne Auton said today that the drivers have given high marks to the changes made to the Nationwide cars for 2014, which include smaller spoilers, a new rear spring package, and new cooling systems.
Also, NASCAR vice president of competition Robin Pemberton talked further about the decision to outlaw two-car tandem drafting for restrictor-plate races in both Nationwide and Trucks.
Pemberton was posed a hypothetical situation by a reporter in which a tandem takes place on the last lap or with two laps remaining in a race. In his response, Pemberton, while noting the unofficial rule of drivers having three laps to heed a black flag, also mentioned NASCAR’s ability to just not score the lap or add a time penalty in post-race.
“That’s been there all along,” he said. “…You know, the rule that — the unwritten rule that you get three laps from getting a black flag, it really doesn’t hold water. I mean, we only give them that, and that started back in the day when people a lot of times didn’t even have radios. So that’s just kind of — it’s the unwritten rule.
“But we expect teams that get the black flag to immediately obey the order from the tower, and we do have the ability to fix the scoring when it’s over with.”
