How about that race weekend at Talladega Superspeedway?
There’s a reason that Talladega is popular with fans: the racing is close, often wild, and it offers the chance to see someone other than the usual suspects take home the prize.
Sunday’s (April 27) NASCAR Cup Series race featured the third career win by an unassuming, tuba-playing youngster who looks like an accountant after he edged out a guy from the northeast who drove Modifieds — NASCAR’s loud open-wheel cousin that they tend not to talk about too much. That guy got disqualified along with another guy from the same home state. The entire Connecticut contingent was wiped out with one drop of the hammer.
There was no Big One, only a couple of little ones, and the race ended under green, rather sedate for Talladega.
Saturday’s NASCAR Xfinity Series race was a whole different story.
That race only featured one more caution than Sunday’s Cup race, but the timing was different, with the fourth coming just a handful of laps before the finish, setting up a six-lap shootout for the win. It came down to a three-wide photo finish, a half lap shy of the checkers because of a brutal crash on the backstretch.
The players: Austin Hill, racing for a Richard Childress Racing program that has dominated the superspeedways; Jeb Burton, the son of the nearly universally popular retired driver Ward Burton; and Jesse Love, an up-and-comer also driving for RCR, hoping for a little redemption after a DQ the previous week.
Hill was gunning for his first Talladega win and the all-time series record on drafting tracks (this because Atlanta Motor Speedway is now included in that category). Hill has given himself the reputation as a driver who thinks he does no wrong — but everyone else sure does. That hasn’t endeared him with some fans.
Burton races for underfunded Jordan Anderson, himself a journeyman driver with a good-guy reputation, and Burton fits that mold. He’s got a couple of wins and overall leaves the impression that the ones that got away got away because of a lack of equipment, not a lack of talent.
Love is a talented young driver just coming into his own who hasn’t shown himself to be overly, well, anything, personality-wise yet.
The rulebook is clear. When the caution is displayed on the final lap, the field is frozen at the moment of caution, and NASCAR will go to still images captured at that moment to determine the winner.
After a few minutes of deliberation, NASCAR declared Hill the victor and Burton the runner-up by inches.
It was not a popular call.
.@TheCW_Sports shows the camera angles that NASCAR used to determine the winner of this afternoon's race at @TALLADEGA. pic.twitter.com/ohj2oVsB6D
— NASCAR Xfinity (@NASCAR_Xfinity) April 26, 2025
It was probably the right call, depending on where you looked, but if Hill was looking for fans to cheer him on in victory lane, he was left disappointed. His win, if validated, was not a fan favorite. That might have been the case no matter the circumstances, but NASCAR’s call certainly didn’t help.
And NASCAR did nothing to really further its case.
The sanctioning body was backed into an uncomfortable corner by the way the race played out. The first thing fans didn’t like was the caution that came out for Connor Zilisch on the last lap.
Zilisch was racing for the lead and led lap 112 to take the white flag before tangling with Love and spinning. NASCAR held off on the yellow flag when the spin started, but once Zilisch hit the wall as hard as he did, the caution was displayed.
As tempting as it must have been to leave the race under green, NASCAR made the right call. Zilisch took a hard hit to the inside wall, and as soon as the caution came out, safety vehicles could head his way. Minutes are critical if a driver is injured, and it’s over a mile from the backstretch to the finish line, so precious time if Zilisch had been seriously hurt. He wasn’t, but there was no way for anyone to know that instantly.
The caution might not have been popular, but it was necessary.
The issue then became when the moment of caution was and what images NASCAR had of the track at that moment. The first one, shown initially on The CW broadcast, was taken from the inside of the track, just behind the leaders. Burton looks to have a slight advantage, with both his nose and left front tire ahead of Hill’s
The second, and seemingly the one NASCAR used to make the final call, was head on from a sizeable distance down the track. In that one, Hill appears to have the lead. Both pictures match the timestamp from the caution light.
Transponder data from the last scoring loop, which would determine the order for any other caution during a race, showed Burton as the winner. The official race report still shows him as leading lap 113, the final lap.
Burton, heartbroken after seeing the win slip away, appealed to NASCAR to look again. Hill lit up his tires.
Heart broken. 💔 https://t.co/ficEJUpPjv
— Jeb Burton (@JebBurtonRacing) April 27, 2025
Did NASCAR make the right call? Based on the head-on photograph, probably, though the camera is far away and the angle is not optimal.
Based on the side-on photo from the apron, maybe not, but that’s a bad angle, too.
The rule to defer to the moment of caution and not the last scoring loop is in place for fans to give them the best chance at a fair finish. Depending on the track, the cars could be some distance from the last loop, and a legitimate lead change could occur in that distance at a track like Talladega.
Where NASCAR misses the mark is relying on a few bad camera angles to choose a winner. With the technology available today, it seems like there could be a better way.
What that might look like has some possibilities.
One is simply more cameras. Instead of relying only on television cameras, have multiple cameras around the track or multiple drone cameras capturing direct overhead shots. If NASCAR had 10 images to choose from, including one that was definitive, it would be easy to make a clear call and offer the fans a quality image that makes the outcome obvious, or at least less ambiguous.
Another option is to revert to the scoring loop, but drastically increase the number of loops around the track so that there is one every few feet. That’s daunting and expensive for a behemoth like Talladega, but surely doable in some fashion. With the amount of data gathered from each car between the scoring transponder and SMT data, perhaps there’s a solution in that direction.
The ending to Saturday’s race was a perfect storm of judgment calls, first the late caution and then choosing a winner from a couple of bad images. It would be hard for the sanctioning body to make a call that satisfied the majority of fans, given what they had to work with.
NASCAR did the best it could with what it had. But was what it had good enough? And would any call have satisfied the fans?
Amy is an 20-year veteran NASCAR writer and a six-time National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) writing award winner, including first place awards for both columns and race coverage. As well as serving as Photo Editor, Amy writes The Big 6 (Mondays) after every NASCAR Cup Series race. She can also be found working on her bi-weekly columns Holding A Pretty Wheel (Tuesdays) and Only Yesterday (Wednesdays). A New Hampshire native whose heart is in North Carolina, Amy’s work credits have extended everywhere from driver Kenny Wallace’s website to Athlon Sports. She can also be heard weekly as a panelist on the Hard Left Turn podcast that can be found on AccessWDUN.com's Around the Track page.