One For the Record Books: 2008 Montreal Nationwide Race Makes History

When the green flag was dropped at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal, Canada, it wasn’t a matter of if it was going to rain, it was when it was going to rain. 

Once the race started, all the announcers could talk about is how history was going to be made because once the rain came, NASCAR would halt the race for three minutes so that teams could come in, change to rain tires, add a windshield wiper on to the car, change shoes (well... at least that’s what Rookie Landon Cassill did), and they could also make any changes that they needed to their race cars. 

Well, a three-minute break turned into about at 10-minute break. Once the cars left pit road and they were all assembled back into the running order that they were in when the race was stopped, they eventually went back to green flag racing.

Some drivers opted to not use windshields, and that was the case with Carl Edwards. “Cousin Carl” decided to use a squeegee to clean his windshield while he was driving under caution.  At one point, rookie Joey “sliced bread” Logano and Jacques Villeneuve wrecked while the yellow flag was flying.

In the end, Canadian Ron Fellows ended up taking the checkered flag after the race had been halted due to the pouring rain and the conditions were getting way too dangerous for the drivers. 

According to Fellows, visibility was a huge problem due to the fact that the cars were going over 70 mph and water was being sprayed everywhere.  I will admit that I was very nervous when they said that they were going to switch over to rain tires, but the drivers were very cautious, and for the most part I thought that things went very well. 

I’m not suggesting that NASCAR should run races in the rain at a place like Daytona, Michigan, or Bristol, but if they want to run races in the rain on road courses, I could see that working as long as the drivers are as cautious as these drivers were today.