NASCAR chose not to issue penalties to Shane van Gisbergen or Austin Hill for their incident, and a secondary retaliatory incident under caution in last Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series event at Chicagoland Speedway. Ditto for Zane Smith, who crashed Carson Hocevar early in the event.
After poring through SMT data, Mike Forde explained on this week’s Hauler Talk Podcast, “nothing, in our eyes, proved definitive,” to prove intent in any of the incidents involving SVG and Hill, or Smith and Hocevar.
And concerning Hill slamming into the side of van Gisbergen’s No. 97 Chevrolet in disapproval under the caution period following their crash together on Lap 49, Forde says that Elton Sawyer, Senior Vice President of Competition for NASCAR, said, “I would have done the same thing, 30 years ago, when I was a driver.”
So, after Chicagoland Speedway, the message seems crystal clear: “Boys have at it,” a system where drivers police each other through retaliation on track, is back. Or is it?
That’s where things aren’t quite as clear.
While NASCAR didn’t deem the incidents in last Sunday’s race as “over-the-line,” they did see the incidents as borderline enough to warrant a discussion between NASCAR and the competitors involved in the separate incidents.
Which just muddies things even more.
These rulings come just a couple of months removed from Ryan Preece being penalized 25 points for the same style of incident when he didn’t lift for Ty Gibbs, who cut down in front of his nose on Lap 101 of the Wurth 400 at Texas Motor Speedway.
Gibbs would crash out of the event and finish 36th, while Preece would go on to finish 14th that day. A few days later, Preece was throttled with penalties handed out by the sanctioning body.
The penalties were upheld following an appeal in front of the National Motorsports Appeals Panel.
The only difference in the Preece incident and the two incidents at Chicagoland Speedway is that Preece was heard being angry at Gibbs on his team radio prior to the contact, and following the race, when asked about the incident, Preece simply said that he didn’t cut Gibbs a break.
Let’s be clear, Preece never admitted that he intentionally crashed Gibbs. He simply didn’t cut his competitor a break.
In my opinion, if what transpired in the two crashes in last Sunday’s eero 400 at Chicagoland Speedway were deemed not to be foul by NASCAR, Preece was hosed by the sanctioning body with the penalties that were dished out to him following the race at Texas Motor Speedway.
Drivers get mad at each other all the time in the middle of races and threaten all sorts of things. Hell, have you ever heard Ryan Blaney’s radio during a race?
Team radio communications are hardly proof of intent. Most of the time, it is simply a driver venting their displeasure in the heat of the moment.
If Ryan Preece misses out on making the Chase for the Championship by a margin of 25 points or less, the RFK Racing driver is going to have every right to feel he was wronged by the penalty call back in May.
