Austin Dillon could face punishment soon from Nascar It wasn’t because he hit Joey Logano on the final lap of Sunday’s Cookout 400 at Richmond Raceway, it was because Denny Hamlin intentionally put him in the wall as the two approached the start-finish line, Jeff Glock of The athlete He said inDisassembly“Podcast.”
The key word here is “may,” as Elton Sawyer, NASCAR’s vice president of competition, said the sanctioning body will make a decision Tuesday. However, Glock doesn’t think NASCAR will issue a suspension for Dillon. Glock predicted that since Dillon’s right-rear hook on Hamlin wasn’t retaliation, NASCAR will avoid a hard blow to Dillon.
“We’ve been told that hitting someone from behind from the right gets you a suspension,” Glock said Sunday. “Well, I don’t think — look, you’ve gotten a lot of flak at me for some of my predictions lately when I said how I think NASCAR is going to penalize things. I don’t really think they’re going to suspend Austin Dillon for hitting someone from behind from the right. Here’s how I think NASCAR is going to tell the difference. NASCAR is going to say that a right backhand in retaliation is where people get suspended. A right backhand like he did to Hamlin to put him in the wall to win, they’re going to say that’s different. And they’re not going to suspend him.”
“Because the problem here is, NASCAR has put itself in a huge box now. It can’t let someone win without a penalty for rough driving. And then suspend the person for that very act. You just can’t. Those two things don’t go together. There’s no logic to justifying those things. You can either take away the win and give him a two-lap penalty for rough driving, which would have actually happened, which would have put Austin Dillon in 26th place. You’d say, ‘Well, you crossed the line, you crossed the line. The two-lap penalty, retroactive to the end of the race, now you’re going to go to 26th. We’ll give it to him.’” [the win] “To second place which in this case, was Denny Hamlin.”
Denny Hamlin has categorically declared that Austin Dillon’s wreck at Richmond was “out of line.”
Dillon was ready to pass Logano and Hamlin. He entered Sunday’s race 32nd in the points standings, well out of contention for the playoffs. But now, Dillon is on the verge of qualifying for the postseason. He will be part of the 16-driver group that NASCAR decided to deny him a win.
As you can imagine, neither Logano nor Hamlin were happy with the outcome. Hamlin believed Dillon had overstepped the mark and should be dealt with accordingly by NASCAR.
“In a major sport, because we like to put ourselves at a higher level of sports in the world, refereeing has a reason,” Hamlin said on “The Sports” on Monday.Harmful actions“Podcast. “I don’t know why we’ve allowed it to get this bad over time. And I think you have a responsibility as a sanctioning body to set an example not only to your competitors but also to people coming up through the ranks to say, ‘This is how we race professionally. This is how racing works.’”
“…let me ask a question: if this is not overstepping the bounds, then what is overstepping the bounds? …He didn’t try to swerve. He just drove his car until he wrecked it. [Logano]”Keep moving forward until you destroy it.”