On Tuesday, NASCAR’s sanctioning body handed out penalties to several teams after their roles in manipulating the finish of Sunday’s Xfinity 500 at Martinsville Speedway.
Members from the Nos. 1, 3 and 23 teams were all suspended for the season finale at Phoenix Raceway. Additionally, those three teams were fined $100K and docked 50 points.
This is, in a word, weak. Suspending members of race teams with virtually nothing to race for is not going to send any sort of message. Neither will the pocket-change fines or the points penalties to, again, teams that have very little at stake. None of this undoes their actions from Sunday, nor does it truly discourage them from using such tactics again.
Furthermore, the penalties were handed out to the wrong people. The race teams were not the true culprits behind what happened at the end of Sunday’s race, when Ross Chastain (No. 1) and Austin Dillon (No. 3) refused to pass William Byron while Bubba Wallace (No. 23) intentionally dropped back to help Christopher Bell. Byron and Bell were racing for the final position to advance to the Championship Four.
The orders clearly came from an even higher authority, that being manufacturer higher-ups at Chevrolet and Toyota. Chastain and Dillon do not drive for the same team as Byron, but all race under the Chevy banner. Similarly, Wallace and 23XI Racing are not teammates to Bell and Joe Gibbs Racing, but both drive Toyotas.
It’s clearly the manufacturers who are pulling the strings, and that’s not unique to just Sunday’s race. Months ago, Parker Retzlaff was reprimanded for helping push a Ford driver (Harrison Burton) to the win at Daytona instead of a fellow Chevrolet (Kyle Busch). At Talladega, Chevy’s Kyle Larson was told not to push Ford’s Brad Keselowski to the win over Chevy’s Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
Manufacturer politics have become a stain on NASCAR racing, and the sanctioning body refuses to hold them accountable. That’s probably because they’re afraid that the manufacturers will pull out of the sport if they aren’t allowed to play their silly little games. That shouldn’t matter.
Elton Sawyer and Co. must assert their authority in situations like this, and time and time again, they have failed to do so.
Some more significant penalties — including potentially suspending drivers — were brought up as a possibility in future situations like this. Still, that’s not addressing the root of the issue. If NASCAR wanted to truly put a stop to this blatant manipulation, it would have penalized Chevrolet and Toyota in the manufacturer standings.
