NASCAR docked Denny Hamlin 25 points this week after an incident involving him and Ross Chastain in Sunday’s United Rentals Work United 500. On the final restart, Hamlin drove Chastain into the wall and then rear-ended him several times.
However, Hamlin’s penalty wasn’t for crashing Chastain. It was for admitting on a podcast the next day that his actions were intentional.
The problem here isn’t necessarily the penalty, but rather the fact that an admission of guilt is required to penalize a driver. In fact, this is the third time in the past year that Hamlin has run into Chastain on track, and in both previous incidents, your eyes should’ve told you all you needed to know.
At Gateway last season, after an early race incident that damaged Hamlin’s car, Hamlin drove into Chastain on a re-start and blocked him several times while being lapped. Then, at Pocono, Hamlin shoved Chastain into the wall while racing for the lead.
Hamlin wasn’t penalized either time. But this past weekend, all it took was Hamlin running his mouth the next day for NASCAR to do what it should’ve done a long time ago.
NASCAR has never been consistent with penalizing drivers for on-track incidents and has even done so in the past on occasions where intent wasn’t admitted to. In October, NASCAR suspended Bubba Wallace for a race for crashing Kyle Larson, and in 2015, Matt Kenseth was suspended two races for putting Joey Logano into the wall.
On both occasions, the only evidence of intent was that the driver at fault made unnatural movement with his car and had reason to be upset with the driver they crashed. That should be enough to call a spade a spade.
Yet the precedent NASCAR is setting here is clear: as long as you pretend it was an accident, you’re golden. It remains to be seen if they’ll hold true to this, but that’s the message being sent.
NASCAR doesn’t need to become overpoliced like IndyCar and Formula 1, where any avoidable contact — even if incidental — is penalized. But this shouldn’t be hard: If a wreck looks intentional, it’s probably intentional, and we shouldn’t need to have a driver own up to it to prove it.