On Wednesday afternoon, NASCAR finally imposed the expected penalties for the chaotic finish to Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series Cook Out 400 at Richmond Raceway. Ultimately, the sanctioning committee decided to award Austin Dillon his fifth career victory, but NASCAR stripped the driver and his team of the playoff spots in the driver and owner championships that came with the win.
Elton Sawyer, NASCAR’s vice president of competition, spoke to the media about the decision on a Zoom call Wednesday afternoon and apologized to fans for the long time it took the sanctioning body to come to a decision. However, the 64-year-old said that NASCAR ultimately wanted to make the right decision on the matter and not make a hasty, quick decision.
“The magnitude of this decision was and is obviously huge, so it was very important to us that we get this right,” Sawyer explained. “We started gathering all the data Sunday night. We went back to work on Monday, and all day yesterday. We looked at all the SMT data, the cameras in the car, the audio data, of course. We gathered all of these facts and had the meetings that we needed. I completely understand our fans and I want to apologize to them for the fact that this has taken so long. They have been patient throughout the process, so I’m talking to them now and letting them know why it has taken so long for us to come to this decision.”
Sawyer further said that NASCAR will speed up the process of announcing penalties in the future.
“Yeah, I think ultimately we’d like to do that and we’ll get to a point where we’re doing that more spontaneously, so to speak,” Sawyer said. “We wanted to make sure again that the most important thing in making these decisions is to get it right. And to make a split-second decision and then get it wrong would be bad of us. The stewards, the time it took and in this case, getting it right rather than making a quick decision. It was more important to take the time to get it right. But it does put us in a position, I would say, where we’re thinking carefully about how we could have done that a lot quicker.”
According to Sawyer, it wasn’t a single action by Dillon on the final lap at Richmond that led to NASCAR’s sanctions. The vice president of competition says it was the confluence of all of Dillon’s moves, from the entry to Turn 3 where he spun Joey Logano, to the exit of Turn 4 where he clipped Denny Hamlin’s right rear, to the start-finish line where Dillon ultimately won the race.
“When you look at all the work, starting in Turn 3, the contact with the 3 and the 22, and continuing through (Turns) 3 and 4, and the contact with the 3 and the 11, all the way to the start and finish line, we looked at it all in its entirety,” Sawyer explained.
Ultimately, NASCAR’s decision was aimed at protecting the series’ championship title as well as the legitimacy of each future weekend’s results.
“The most important thing is that we want to make sure that when we get to Phoenix, we protect the integrity of our playoffs and our championship. We want to make sure our competitors understand that we want them to make all the decisions. We want them to be able to race hard. That’s what our sport has been about for over 75 years. But we also want them to understand – and I think every single one of them understands – that this has gone too far.”
While NASCAR’s penalty report sent a clear message to competitors in the sport about what is and isn’t acceptable when battling for a NASCAR Cup Series win, many wondered why NASCAR didn’t strip Dillon of the win outright. Sawyer says that while NASCAR will look into adding a provision to the rulebook addressing race win stripping, they currently simply don’t have a provision in the rulebook that would allow them to strip race wins.
“Right now, yes,” Sawyer said when asked if NASCAR was considering taking the win away from Dillon. “When we looked at the rulebook, there’s no mechanism in the rulebook right now that gives us that option. That’s something we can look at in the future. But just based on our rulebook, which helped us make that decision, we got to where we are now.”
The other pressing question was: Why wasn’t Dillon suspended for intentionally hooking Hamlin’s right rear? Other drivers, including the sport’s most popular driver, Chase Elliott, and Bubba Wallace, have been suspended for similar situations in recent seasons. Sawyer says each situation presents different circumstances.
“We looked at the situations with Bubba and Chase and they were incidents on a mile and a half race track at 160 miles per hour. I’m not saying that Richmond wouldn’t be considered (for a suspension) if he made a maneuver like that, but every single situation is different,” Sawyer explained.
Ultimately, Sawyer wants to make it clear that Dillon’s attempt to win out of desperation at Richmond will not be tolerated, but he also wants to make it clear that NASCAR does not want to discourage drivers from competing in the traditional, hard-hitting, full-contact NASCAR racing.
“…like I said, we encourage that. We want our racers to go out there and race hard and race hard, like I said Sunday night, that’s been our DNA for over 75 years,” Sawyer said. “But what happened Sunday night, from a NASCAR perspective, when you look at all the data and analyze it and talk about it, crossed the line. That’s not the type of racing, that’s not how we want our races to end. That’s not how we want to crown a champion, that’s not how we want to crown an event.”
