While Chris Gabehart, crew chief for Denny Hamlin and the Joe Gibbs Racing No. 11, largely endorsed the penalty NASCAR issued to Austin Dillon on Wednesday afternoon, he has just one push back on the matter.
He addressed that sole concern on Thursday morning during an appearance on The Morning Drive on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.
“They got it right with the exception of this,” Gabehart explained. “I want us to get to a world where the officials feel empowered to make those decisions 60 hours ahead of time.”
He means in real time.
“I know that may be controversial from where we’ve been and et cetera, but I’ll go back to my same old example that I love to use, where you try to draw parallels to other sports,” Gabehart said. “So let’s say we’re at a football game, the clock strikes zero. The, the team that’s on offense is two points behind. You know they’re throwing, they’re throwing a pass into the end zone and you know it’s gonna be a jump ball.
Who’s gonna catch it? And it, if they catch it, they win the game. If the defender knows that, that referee’s not going to go throw a flag, he’ll just clobber the offensive player, the wide receiver, right? Just clobber him, take him out.
“Well then that guarantees that the the team on defense is going to win the football game.”
Dillon clobbered Hamlin and Joey Logano at Richmond, to further the analogy.
“The problem with that is the defender knows that if he clobbers him, there’s going to to be a pass interference flag thrown and they’ll get another play and it’ll be in the offense’s favor,” Gabehart said.
Gabehart says the figurative flag has been thrown in real time at every step along his racing career until reaching NASCAR. He referenced an example of it in the CARS Tour race last month at Hickory Motor Speedway.
Gabehart argues that is has to be in the culture of NASCAR officiating to make that call in real time because there is a safety element involved. Dillon turned hard left to right rear hook Hamlin into the wall, and the SMT data confirmed it, with Gabehart revealing it as one of the hardest hits in the three-year NextGen car era.
The crash at Pocono in 2022 that retired Kurt Busch recorded a 30g spike upon impact.
Denny Hamlin on Sunday night?
“Every time you have a significant enough incident that warrants a further look into the incident data recorder, NASCAR will send you the data for that incident,” Gabehart said. “Joe Gibbs Racing has had 21 of those instances in the Gen-7 era. 21 times we’ve gotten data from a crash from one of our four cars.
“Do you wanna know what the highest recorded g spike in the history of Gen-7 was for JGR? It was Richmond and the 11 car.
“Sunday night, 32g spike in the wall off Turn 4 coming to the checker flag. Highest ever recorded.
“I might add higher than the one that unfortunately put Kurt Busch into retirement, ultimately at Pocono higher than that. So some flagrant fouls are flagrant. They’re dangerous. That’s why you allow the referees to throw the flag. And we’ve just gotta get to a point where we, where we’re willing to throw the flag on Sunday night. That’s the only thing I think we got wrong about this in my opinion.”