CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — Kimi Raikkonen couldn’t get over how many restarts there were in the waning laps of NASCAR’s first road course race of the season. Jordan Taylor called his NASCAR debut “a race of survival” and Jenson Button found much of it “a bit silly.”
That was the verdict from three of the most experienced road racers in the world after a mess of a NASCAR race that took three overtimes to be decided. Tyler Reddick finally won it Sunday when the race at Circuit of the Americas went seven laps past the scheduled distance to reach a conclusion.
Raikkonen, who scored his final Formula One victory on the Texas road course in 2018, found himself fourth on one of the many late restarts with a view of the lead out his front windshield. That didn’t last long; he was gobbled up, run off course and shuffled back to a 29th-place finish.
“It looked like you’d be very good, then three corners later, somebody’s going the wrong direction,” the former F1 world champion said. “It’s such a shame how it went in the end, but I think we did the right thing. We were there. But then on the restart it’s how it was.”
Button, the 2009 F1 world champion who has two more NASCAR races scheduled this season and is part of NASCAR’s lineup in a modified stock car for the 24 Hours of Le Mans, was the highest-finishing road course ringer at 18th. It was an eye-opening experience for the British driver based on the length of the race — the overtimes sent it past its scheduled distance of 68 laps for a run time of 3 hours, 30 minutes — and the physical nature of NASCAR drivers using stock cars to slam into one another.