A person leaning on the switch to trigger the caution lights at Bristol Motor Speedway brought out the final yellow in Sunday’s Food City 500.
Carl Edwards’s had his third Bristol victory in land when the caution lights came on, shortly thereafter rain came earning him the win.
NASCAR’s Robin Pemberton spoke about the incident during his media availability after Sunday’s race.
“Yeah, after review of the situation post-race, what had happened in the closing laps of the race, it appears that in the flag stand one of the flag people had leaned on the switch that is the manual override for the caution lights, and so that happened.”
Once the flag man saw the lights partially lit up he threw the caution flag to freeze the field.
“It appears that in, not all, but most of the flag stands have a manual override for the caution lights, and due to the weather and due to other things, there’s an area that it couldn’t have been — it wasn’t secured properly, and the flag person leaned against the switch and turned the caution lights on. We tried to turn them off, and we realized that the override switch was on and they were hung on caution. It was a stupid error.”
To be clear Pemberton stressed that that caution was thrown by the flag stand once the lights were noticed.
” When the people in the flag stand saw that the caution lights were illuminated and they did not have the flag out, they threw the flag out. Then we realized what happened. We were scanning cars and spotters, and there’s some of us in the tower that only heard it after the teams were talking about it because we were looking at other things around the racetrack. So there was basically three times in there.”
