The first to offer congratulations to Austin Hill after capturing Richard Childress Racing’s 100th win in the NASCAR Xfinity Series on March 29 at Martinsville Speedway was his crew chief Chad Haney.
“Dude, I hate this place too, but that was unbelievable,” Haney was heard telling his driver on the CW broadcast.
Unbelievable was an understatement and Haney is probably not the only person who hated Martinsville after the U.S. Marine Corps 250.
Hill was the benefactor of a desperation move in turn 3 of the final lap by Sammy Smith, who got out a roll of stamps and shipped it into leader Taylor Gray. Smith took out Gray, then himself, then half the field as Hill — who restarted seventh — skirted around the chaos for his second win of the season.
Smith instantly had a target on his head and he knew it when speaking to the media after the fact. He didn’t care and his justification for the move was …interesting.
“I know everyone’s going to be mad and upset with me, but I don’t care because everybody does it,” Smith said. “If I had just accepted it and finished second today, that wasn’t going to sit well with me.”
‘Everyone’ might be a stretch … but it’s impossible to say nobody would have done it. Not after the racing we saw before the white flag even waved.
The final stage of Saturday’s race saw 10 cautions with only one green flag run longer than eight laps. Some of those were simple spins and your typical short track affair. The overwhelming majority were from some of the best drivers in the series outright running each other over.
Carson Kvapil decided to throw a block on Hill early in the final stage, so Hill decided to just drive through Kvapil heading into turn 1. A few laps later, Sam Mayer squeezed Connor Zilisch into the wall on the frontstretch and then ran Kvapil all the way to the inside wall.
Later, Hill used Christian Eckes as his brakes going into turn 1 and the ensuing domino effect took out Kvapil and Hill’s RCR teammate in Jesse Love.
Eckes later got taken three-wide by Kaulig teammate Daniel Dye — a move CW color commentator Parker Kligerman described as a “low percentage move” — and both got collected when Mayer decided he was done lifting for people with 19 laps to go.
It was only after that mess that the finish happened. Altogether, the race saw 14 cautions for 104 laps and a blazing average speed of 54.615 miles per hour. A new track record.
In a vacuum, what happened at Martinsville stunk and requires a stern message from NASCAR to the series. It’s also, sadly, par for the course for the series at the Paperclip.
The average Xfinity race at Martinsville since 2020 has 10.6 cautions. That’s excluding stage breaks, competition cautions and stoppages for weather. For comparison, the Cup races during that span — which the majority of were twice as long — averaged 6.6 cautions.
Numbers alone don’t capture the controversy drivers tend to create there. If someone mentions that time a driver wrecked their teammate for a win, do you think of Hill tangling with Sheldon Creed when they were at RCR or Ty Gibbs wrecking Brandon Jones to end Jones’ first stint at Joe Gibbs Racing?
It’s surely this new crop of young drivers, right? Sure … to a certain extent. The problems the Xfinity Series has had at Martinsville haven’t been isolated to the last few seasons.
The Xfinity record for cautions in a Martinsville race came in the Goody’s 250 on July 22, 2006 at Martinsville. It was the first time the series went to The Paperclip in 12 years … and last time they went for another 14 years.
The 19 cautions that day didn’t discriminate between the young and the experienced. Steve Wallace spun twice in the first 13 laps. Kyle Busch, Ron Hornaday, JJ Yeley and Boris Said were among those who had multiple accidents over the course of the day.
The race at Martinsville was replaced on the schedule with NASCAR’s debut in Canada at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal. Nearly two decades later, a repeat of that decision is one of the many options the series should weigh after the performance by some of their top drivers this past weekend.
Martinsville is, as Dale Earnhardt Jr. said on X after Saturday’s race, “historic in the grand scheme of all things NASCAR.” It’s been on a NASCAR schedule since the inception of the organization in 1948. It is to NASCAR what Fenway Park is to baseball or Lambeau Field is to football. It’s tradition. It’s history. It should be treated as sacred grounds.
It’s why NASCAR should take the Xfinity Series away from Martinsville. Why? Take note from Joe Gibbs Racing’s Chris Gabehart.
“They clearly don’t understand what it takes to stand on the frontstretch (on Sunday),” Gabehart said. “They obviously don’t have a clue. Hopefully they figure it out, but if you want to stand on the frontstretch today, you can’t act like you did yesterday.”
I’d take it a step further. If you want to win a grandfather clock as bad as Sammy Smith and others say they do, give them two options. You can clean up your act and get a Cup ride, or you can also do what all the Xfinity owners have been doing every time the series leaves Martinsville: open up your wallet.
James Krause joined Frontstretch in March 2024 as a contributor. Krause was born and raised in Illinois and graduated from Northern Illinois University. He currently works in La Crosse, Wisconsin as a local sports reporter, including local short track racing. Outside of racing, Krause loves to keep up with football, music, anime and video games.