For as much grief as NASCAR has gotten for phantom debris and inconsistent speeding penalties, today they did it right.

Ironically to get it right, they first had to mess it up. On the caution around lap 180, they announced on the radio that pit road was open, but the individual manning the lights missed the call. The pit road light stayed red. The result was some teams pitting with a red light (meaning pit road closed) and some teams staying out.

At this point there was no right answer for NASCAR. They could not really penalize the teams that pitted on red, but if the teams that stayed out now pitted they would be behind those that did on the restart. It was a no win for anybody. NASCAR stepped up and told everybody it was a “free pit” and the restart order would be based on the running order at the time of the caution.

Mike Helton then showed up on the broadcast fully admitting that NASCAR “got it wrong”.

NASCAR has suffered from some pretty big credibility issues this year. It looks like they have started down a path to correct that.

Here is an article that covers the race today.