NASCAR's Austin Dillon Penalty Brings a Close to a Nasty Loophole

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It is no secret that some of NASCAR's appeal is what happens when drivers make contact with each other on track. Door-slamming is exciting, but the full-contact nature of the sport has clear potential to give way to intentional wrecking. Some of that is even typically seen as acceptable in stock car racing, but if such wrecking were to go unchecked, every race would end with a crash up front. The line between the two has typically been left for drivers to decide, but on Sunday, NASCAR finally faced a finish ugly enough that the series had to draw the line itself.

The finish actually involved two different wrecks, both egregious. Austin Dillon, who had led the majority of the day's final stint at Richmond Raceway and was in line to win before a crash further back in the field forced a restart, found himself in second heading into the final corners. He was more than a full car length back of Joey Logano when the leader slowed for turn 3, but Dillon closed the gap quickly by simply rushing into Logano's rear bumper. After Logano's spin, Dillon was briefly passed on the inside by third-place Denny Hamlin. As Hamlin moved back up toward the racing line on the exit of turn 4, Dillon swiped down the track and spun Hamlin hard into the outside wall.

Dillon, for his part, claimed an intent to hit the No. 22 of Logano but described the hit on the No. 11 of Hamlin that followed as "just whatever my body did." He claimed in further post-race remarks that the first hit was designed to "get the 22 loose" and the second was purely reaction, two answers that are notable in that they are not Dillon calling either an intentional wrecking. NASCAR has previously suspended two drivers a race each for what the series deemed to be intentional crashes in the past two seasons.

If the hits were intentional, and they certainly seem to be, Dillon's reasoning can likely be explained to some degree by a championship format designed to reward urgency. As he was sitting a distant 32nd in the driver's championship, his only route to a playoff berth was a win. By even eking out a last-place finish in NASCAR's win-and-get-in postseason, Dillon would have instantly jumped up to a guaranteed 16th-place finish in the series standings. The playoffs are designed to create a winner-take-all attitude, and unfortunately, the finish at Richmond is the inevitable endpoint to a format that rewards winning no matter the context.

That reality makes both hits more of a competition decision than an emotional outburst, but these sorts of things do not happen every week. The same rules of risk and reward are at play in every single regular-season race, but the vast majority of races do not end in multiple final-corner wrecks orchestrated by the same driver. Many drivers, including both Hamlin and Logano, have won races by hitting the driver in front of them in the past. What they have not done is take out two opponents in the same set of corners back to back.

If NASCAR were to have left what Dillon did unpunished, it would've changed the metagame of winning a Cup Series race. A lesser ruling would have set a precedent that a playoff berth can be taken by force after a driver loses the lead on track not once but twice, at which point teams would be giving up a competitive advantage if they ever finished a race without wrecking the leading driver.

NASCAR had to either draw the line somewhere or decide there was no line at all. Finally, on Wednesday, the series drew that line. Dillon was allowed to keep his win, but he was handed a 25-point penalty and stripped of the playoff-qualifying benefit to his win. That means the winner fans saw crowned on Sunday night remains the winner that will go down in the record books, but the championship reward for the win has been stripped away.

Elton Sawyer, a senior vice president of competition at NASCAR and the regular voice of the sanctioning body's biggest officiating decisions, said that NASCAR "came to the conclusion that a line had been crossed. Our sport has been based going for many, many years, forever, on good, hard racing. Contact has been acceptable. We felt like, in this case, that the line was crossed."

By ruling that Dillon violated its playoff eligibility rules with his moves, the series has effectively set a precedent that wrecking two different drivers for a playoff spot is unacceptable. That is a good, albeit low, bar to set for the future of the sport. NASCAR will inevitably face these same questions if a driver clearly wrecks just one driver for a playoff-qualifying win in the future, but for now, the series has sewn closed a loophole that allowed a driver to instantly make their season a success by taking out multiple competitors.

The series also issued two corresponding penalties, each in response to related incidents that circulated as videos on social media post-race. One was a $50,000 fine to Joey Logano, who did a burnout near Dillon's box while the pit lane was hot but notably filled with people. The other was a three-race suspension for Dillon's spotter, who shouted "Wreck him!" shortly before Dillon came down the track and slammed into Hamlin. Since both of these acts demonstrated a clear disinterest in either safety or sportsmanship, the penalties are hard to argue against.

NASCAR still has a long way to go in deciding how much crashing is allowed across its many series. The series once lived by a mantra of "Boys Have At It" and refused to penalize any reckless driving, but that line has shifted recently. Still, penalties for on-track behavior are typically reserved for egregious intentional hits like the ones that got Bubba Wallace and Chase Elliott suspended in each of the past two seasons. The line seemed to shift further when the series notably issued a two-lap penalty for a bumper-to-bumper hit that took out a Truck Series competitor earlier this year.

The Dillon ruling is the most high-profile driving standards decision yet, even if NASCAR has technically classified it as a question of playoff eligibility instead. The sanctioning body continues to run under a ruleset that encourages this kind of behavior, but flagrant intentional crashes are now fair game for post-race review. Soon, hopefully, this line of thinking will extend into the races themselves and NASCAR will not have to wait three days to decide on whether or not a driver has gone too far on track. Until then, it's promising to see that NASCAR has made a good decision in a bad situation.

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