NASCAR has a lot to consider in what penalty to issue Austin Dillon after Richmond

At this point, the court of public opinion has offered a thorough indictment of what happened on the final lap of the Cup Series race on Sunday at Richmond but the court of NASCAR will not issue its ruling until Wednesday.

Typically, the weekly penalty report is published on Tuesday but this one will not come out until a day later, which is not totally unprecedented when the sanctioning body has a lot of details to sort through. That is certainly the case regarding Sunday night.

By now, everyone has seen the footage of Austin Dillon first driving through Joey Logano in the final corner, being passed by Denny Hamlin as a result, but then turning hard left to crash a second contender to secure the win.

NASCAR reviewed it for two minutes in real-time before declaring Dillon the winner.

Since then, even more damming information has come out, from spotter Brandon Benesch telling Dillon to ‘wreck him,’ in reference to Hamlin and throttle trace data that paints a very clear picture of the No. 3 car turning hard into the No. 11.

There isn’t a lot of ambiguity to the data, no matter how hard Dillon has tried to make the case, including to Dale Earnhardt Jr. on the Dale Jr. Download podcast this week.

“Let’s go back to going into Turn 3,” Dillon told Earnhardt. “Obviously, I’m doing everything I can to try and give my team a shot to win,” Dillon said. “I’m trying to get Joey loose. As I go in the corner, got a lot of speed, but actually I kind of had the car under control pretty good with a hard entry. I end up second lane middle when I get the car pointed to come back down the hill. On exit of Turn 4 at Richmond, the track naturally drives you to the wall when you’re running the yellow line. Denny’s on the lower line, I’ve got a really good Diamond kind of angle at the track at this point.

“So, my vision is clear still, and I’m looking at the start/finish line. But my straightest point to the start/finish line is about mid-track, which isn’t optimal for the guy coming up the track. Denny, I think in his podcast, said that he didn’t even know I was there. When he came into my view, he’s carrying more speed than I am. If he clears me a little bit further, none of this happens. If he’s half a car length further back, he takes me to the wall with him and we crash at the wall.

“When he comes up, I’m headed to the same angle as I am. His right rear catches my left front. At that point, if I hold the wheel right, I’m going this way. I mean, I’m trying to turn my car to keep the same direction I’m going at that point.”

At this point, there is no ambiguity for what Benesch said either, and Dillon conceded it too.

“From my spotter, I feel like he became a fan in the stands on the last lap of Austin Dillon and RCR,” Dillon said. “He was just saying what came to his mind in the moment and it was wrong and I’m sure if there’s going to be something from that.”

Consequence?

But is there going to be a penalty of some kind for Dillon and the team at large?

It’s tricky for NASCAR, who collectively wanted to encourage drivers to make ethically dubious decisions in the face of a win and advance championship format, with Dillon taking that sentiment to its greatest extreme.

But the general sentiment inside the garage is that Dillon took it too far by blatantly wrecking two contenders in one corner, something that hasn’t been done before, stopping at literally nothing in the pursuit of winning his way into the Cup Series playoffs.

And that’s really what this is all about.

Dillon has suffered through a dreadful season, the worst of his career, and one that had left him outside of the top-30 in the championship standings with no other way into the playoffs other than winning his way in.

So, when he got beat on the final restart, after dominating the final stage, the only way to get back what he had lost was to wipe out both Logano and Hamlin and he did it.

Beyond the pride element of racing for the championship, making the playoffs also comes with a great financial reward, with Dillon securing at a minimum the difference of two million dollars in finishing no worse than 16th in the standings this year.

So, what can NASCAR really do that would make this not worth it?

Any financial penalty less than two million dollars will make the decision to wreck both Logano and Hamlin worth it. It would just be a five-figure investment to have made a seven-figure return and NASCAR isn’t going to fine Dillon a record $2 million.

NASCAR could choose to suspend Dillon for this weekend’s race at Michigan International Speedway, upholding one potential precedence, but what does that matter to the Richard Childress Racing No. 3 team and its driver because they successfully made the playoffs.

So, the only thing NASCAR can do to ensure this line isn’t crossed again is to either disqualify him, three days after the fact, or encumber the win, meaning that he remains the victor in principle but receives no playoff advancement for it.

Doing so, would also create a precedence and as senior vice president of competition Elton Sawyer conceded on Sunday night, it’s not their natural inclination to take wins away for reasons not technical inspection related.

“Our sport has been a contact sport for a long time,” Sawyer said. “You always hear, ‘Where’s the line, did someone cross the line?’ I would say the last lap was awful close to the line, we’ll take a look at all of the available resources from audio to video, listen to spotters, we’ll listen to crew chiefs and drivers and if anything rises to a level that we feel like we need to penalize then we’ll do that on Tuesday.

“We’ll look at all of the available resources, look at audio, look at video, look at SMT Data as we normally do in a situation like this and make a determination on Tuesday,” Sawyer said.

And the most obvious question for Sawyer from that is what is the line if that isn’t it? And if, upon further evaluation it did really cross a line, doesn’t that have to imply a disqualification of some kind?

“Historically it hasn’t been our DNA to take races away but that’s not to say that going forward this wouldn’t start to set a precedent, we’d have to look at it,” Sawyer said.

The general consensus

What Dillon did on Sunday was not well-received within the garage, beyond how Hamlin and Logano felt.

Tyler Reddick, who drives for Hamlin and Michael Joran didn’t like it, purely from a precedence standpoint.

“From what I’ve seen, from what I’ve personally experienced, I’ve always understood if you right hook somebody, you’re gone for a couple of races, you’re losing points, you’re not getting the finish on track where you did, you get some sort of a penalty,” Reddick said Monday on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. “That’s the part that I’m struggling to understand. But I mean, I guess I get it. I mean, it ultimately worked out, (Dillon) won the race and he’s in the playoffs. Just very surprised by all of it.”

Reddick also thinks allowing Dillon to keep the win and playoff berth sets a terrible precedence for future playoff deciding moments.

“If what happened last night is okay at Richmond, why would it not be okay at Phoenix to win the championship,” Reddick said.

Reddick also worries about the example this sets for his son as he expresses his own interest in motorsports.

“I’m worried about what this does for the young kids watching the sport, my kids watching the sport,” Reddick said. “My kid thinks it’s Ok, because NASCAR thinks it’s Ok. I needed to explain to him what happened, what’s not okay that’s the crazy precedence it is setting.”

2014 Cup Series champion Kevin Harvick, now a FOX Sports analyst faced a similar dynamic.

“Here’s the hard part: 15 seconds after this race ended and the cars crossed the start-finish line, my phone’s ringing, and the first question from (son) Keelen was, ‘Dad, is that okay for me to do? What would you tell me?’”

Harvick says there has to be consequences for what Dillon did.

“Now, what we have to decide as an industry is what’s right and what’s wrong,” Harvick said. “How do we officiate it? Who’s going to officiate it? Because I don’t think that’s exactly how everybody wants to race, but it’s the position you’re in this type of scenario with the points and the playoff system and the things that we do, knowing that there are no consequences. There are no consequences for what just happened.”

“There was a line crossed on the racetrack with the 3 car, certainly a line crossed in the spotter’s stand … a lot of lines got crossed” Earnhardt said.

“I’d expect something around the spotter audio. And I’m not sure what NASCAR could do or would do beyond that.

I think that it’s a very important moment for NASCAR. They cannot NOT de(f)er this. That was too far.”

And no, Earnhardt does not believe this is something his father would have done.

“I don’t know if I saw dad ever clean two of ’em out in the last corner,” he said.

So that is what NASCAR is taking the extra day to determine and that’s to say nothing of the likely penalty for Logano throttling up on pit road with industry people all around him, in the effort to send a message to the 3 team right next to him.

Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.