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Kyle Larson won the NASCAR Advent Health 400 at Kansas Speedway by 0.001 seconds over Chris Buescher Sunday night.
It was hailed as the closest finish in the racing organization’s 76-year history.
And it was. They got that part right. But did Kyle Larson really win by a millisecond?
Longtime NASCAR driver Denny Hamlin isn’t so sure.
“I almost feel like the 0.001 is just a made up number at this point,” Hamlin said on his Actions Detrimental podcast this week. “How can they say it’s 0.001, if the electronics say the other way around?”
Jared Allen then brought up that someone told him that in the pit box the margin of victory read 0.000 on NASCAR’s timing and scoring.
“I have timing and scoring on my bus, as well,” Hamlin replied. “I have timing and scoring in my bus, right by my couch, so I can kind of watch races and watch lap times, and pay attention to some things and it said triple zeros on mine, as well. That’s what I’m saying. I think it’s just made up.”
It was then brought up that supposedly NASCAR determined the winner using photos.
OFFICIAL: The margin of victory was 0.001 seconds.
That is the closest finish in NASCAR Cup Series history. pic.twitter.com/QbXn0i8H9u
— NASCAR (@NASCAR) May 6, 2024
“You can’t tell time by a by a single photo. You can’t,” Hamlin responded.
“You see an inch, but you don’t know. You can’t quantify that, in time. That’s why I’m saying if timing and scoring showed triple zeros, as a tie, like I think they just add the one on the end, just to say it was closer. Because they can’t say it’s triple zeros, because then people would say, ‘We got a tie then, it’s a tie.'”
“Yeah, I’ve seen the photo,” Chris Buescher told Bob Pockrass after the race. “It just looks like it was taken on a 1940s camera. I can’t even tell. I don’t know what to make out of that one right now. So hopefully somebody has a clear shot to where I can understand a little bit better at least.”
Chris Buescher thought he had won. Immediately after the race, he said he wanted to see a better photo (it's an image created from thousands of frames of a high-speed image so that is why cameras look compressed). Buescher's thoughts on the last laps and finish: pic.twitter.com/mkijIT0zkH
— Bob Pockrass (@bobpockrass) May 6, 2024
“We were celebrating down the backstretch and looked at the pylon, and we were P1 up there,” Buescher also said after finding out he didn’t win. “Everything we had said we had gotten it. Obviously not. The only thing I have to go off of is a grainy photo right now, and at this point it just sounds like I am complaining, and I guess I am because I don’t see it in that.
“I don’t understand how the timing system can read it out one way and not the other. We just got to understand it better.”