Richard Childress believes that NASCAR racing has been fundamentally changed forever in the aftermath of the penalty to Austin Dillon and the two appeals that ultimately upheld that decision.
“Their ruling has changed NASCAR racing on the final lap forever,” Childress said prior to Cup Series track action on Saturday at Darlington Raceway. “The drivers, now, know where the line is, or they think they do. If you go in a car length and 2-3-quarters was exactly how far back he was, and the other car slows down three miles-per-hour, on the last lap, you’re going to bump him a little to get him up the race track. Is that over now? What is the line?
“And then if you go to racing somebody off of the corner, and they get loose and get into you, then does that mean you’re out of the Playoffs? That’s all I’ve got to say about the ruling. But it has changed racing for a win for sure.”
Dillon, who drives for his grandfather (Childress) in the Cup Series, initiated contact with both Joey Logano and Denny Hamlin on the final lap at Richmond Raceway earlier in the month en route to winning the race but had the playoff berth associated with it stripped as part of a penalty announced three days after.
The Childress team appealed to the three-person National Motorsports Appeal Panel, lost, appealed again to Final Appeals Officer Bill Mullis and lost with finality to cement the results. With that said, it’s a result that they strongly disagrees with.
The result stings from both a competition and business standpoint as Dillon remains outside the top-30 in the championship standings but a playoff berth would have meant finishing no worse than 16th. That carries value of around a million dollars per year over the next three years based on the machinations of the charter system that governs NASCAR revenue.
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“It’s over a million dollars to us, what it boils down to,” Childress said. “Largest fine ever in NASCAR. I’m just disappointed, disappointed, disappointed. That’s all I can say. When I write my book, that will be a chapter in it. On second thought, I might write a second book and publish it, it’ll be 60 years in NASCAR after I’m gone.”
Childress says he believes he would have a legal case on appeal, if those were the courts that governed NASCAR, but league rules prohibit teams from suing the sanctioning body.
“An appointed appeal group — it’s tough to beat an appointment in anything,” Childress said. “If it was a legal case, we had attorneys look at both sides of it, there was no way we would have lost.”
Speaking to Kevin Harvick on FOX Sports’ Happy Hour, NASCAR president Steve Phelps said not penalizing Dillon, especially when telemetry and throttle/steering trace data suggested the contact had intent, would change the direction of NASCAR racing in its own way.
“If we hadn’t penalized it, then I think what we would see over the next 12 weeks would look significantly different,” Phelps said. “We just can’t have it.
“It really comes down to ‘what do you want your sport to be?’ And that’s why I think we ruled the way we did because we’re not demolition derby; we’re just not. We are a sport that if we had done nothing, we would’ve opened ourselves up for a mess, honestly.”
In other words, no penalty would have meant no rules on the final lap and that races could be determined by any decision, ethical or otherwise, all the way up to the championship race. It was a possibility that left a lot of racers wary the week afterwards.
Childress meanwhile does not view it that way.
