Last weekend at the Martinsville Speedway, the NASCAR Cup Series saw a bizarre, brilliant and to those that played racing video games, familiar move, at the final turn of the 500-lap race.
Ross Chastain, the driver of the #1 car wallrides the last turn, intentionally smashing the car against the wall, and slingshots past five cars to finish fifth in the race.
The fifth-place finish was enough to secure Chastain’s spot in the top 4 drivers gunning for the year’s championship, bumping rival Danny Hemlin out of contention- who happens to be the last driver Chastain overtook with his gamer move, just right at the finish line.
And it is indeed a video game move. In the post-race interview, he credited his time playing the NASCAR video games for inspiring that magnificent, unprecedented move.
“I played a lot of NASCAR 2005 on the Gamecube with [brother] Chad growing up and you can get away with it,” Chastain said, referring to wallriding.
“I never knew if it would actually work.”
Fellow drivers were also in disbelief seeing that wallriding works.
The Next-Gen NASCAR cars, new for 2022, are built to be strong and robust and it looks like the car’s strong enough to sustain a wallride.
For NASCAR fans, this is one of the most amazing moves seen in the sport’s history, and the reaction towards the video game move has been positive.
The wallriding lap is a new lap record- 18.845 seconds. That’s close to a whole second faster than pole-sitter Kyle Larson’s 19.709, and also faster than the track’s qualifying record of 18.954 seconds.
The move is legal, and makes for a fairytale story of how an underdog got their big break in the championship. And it’s a wonderful story of how video games bleed into real-life. But it’s going to be a bad look for NASCAR if this is the norm.
Even in multiplayer racing games these days, wallriding is frowned upon, with many games like Gran Turismo 7 and Forza Horizon 5 enforcing slow-down penalties for wall riding. Why slow down and brake when you can go just as fast, if not faster by letting the wall steer for you?
Hopefully, it’s a “cool move, don’t do that again” situation. The idea of multiple cars (the NASCAR Cup Series has a grid of 30+cars) trying to desperately rub on the walls- where some tracks have the audience sitting fairly close to said walls doesn’t sound as cool, that’s dangerous. Keep those wild moves in video games.