Contact cleaner

Should NASCAR penalize intentional contact?

By Willie S. Morrissey

Did you expect Kyle Larson to lose [the final spot in the Round of 8] two points to Chase Briscoe? – KFB_FAN1818, YouTube


I didn’t see it coming.

After the Oct. 2 race at Talladega Superspeedway, the 2021 NASCAR Cup Series champion was just 18 points above the cut line.


Going into last Sunday’s (October 9) round at Charlotte Motor Speedway ROVAL, William Byron jumped into the green again after winning his appeal. Byron got back the 25 points he was originally penalized for spinning (not destroying) Denny Hamlin on bail.

At first, it didn’t matter. Kyle Larson did like Kyle Larson, especially on the road courses as a Hendrick Motorsports driver. He raced steadily forward, finishing the stages sixth and third respectively.


And then he slid into the wall and was five laps down as the crew replaced a toe link. Larson finished 35th while Chase Briscoe advanced thanks to a ninth-place finish and tail gunner assistance from teammate Cole Custer of Stewart-Haas Racing.

Although Larson at least doubled Briscoe’s totals in wins, top fives and top 10s, the margin between them was only two points.


In favor of Briscoe.

That’s how the playoffs go, especially in this ultra-competitive season when no one (except maybe Chase Elliott) has the kind of massive playoff point buffer that effectively prevents elimination. Austin Cindric, 10th in the playoff standings after the ROVAL, was just 30 points behind leader Elliott when the checkered flag fell.

If you’re a Larson fan, I understand your disappointment (and I guess KFB_FAN1818 understands too). Your guy is out of the championship hunt in a year, his chances were as good as anyone. Like Kyle Busch, Kevin Harvick and Tyler Reddick, all eliminated in the round of 16.


Heck, even Daniel Suarez, in his first playoff appearance, looked like a solid pick to advance to the knockout stages until power steering failure within 50 laps of the ROVAL did so. fall five turns. Considering Trackhouse Racing Team’s strength at mile-and-a-half, which make up two of the three races in the final elimination round, Championship 4 wouldn’t have been an impossible ask.

But is it a problem that requires a solution? I say no. At least not targeted. Fixing the reliability issues with the Next Gen car and its Goodyear tires will go a long way to reducing the unfairness of these eliminations. But at the end of the day, this is NASCAR, not a fourth-grade science fair. For someone to win, everyone else has to lose, and it doesn’t matter if they’re not happy about it.


It would be like NASCAR to see the fans react to the big names’ early eliminations and change the rules again. Maybe they’ll offer more playoff points for finishing regular season position or double the playoff points earned for race wins or stage wins, or maybe there’s will have an artificial way to return after elimination.

To that, I say: NASCAR, this offseason, just focus on reengineering the rear clip of Next Gen cars and getting a new deal with the RTA. Sure, fans get upset about a million different things, but they’re NASCAR fans, that’s what they do. It sucks for Larson and his fans, but hey, that’s what next year is for.

Because we’ve seen 19 different winners this year, the point totals are going to be closer. Because non-elimination drivers have won races, there will be fewer championship chasers locked in. Due to random mechanical failures, some top riders will be at risk.


After a few years in the playoff points era where dominant drivers were pretty much locked in the 4 championship with 10 races to go, I for one am happy to see a season where it seems like anything can happen.

Why doesn’t NASCAR review all contacts on the track during the race? Give them something to do. Just a separate department to do revisions. Why can’t pilots run cleanly? -Willow Spicewood, YouTube

I will answer them in reverse order.


NASCAR drivers are the best stock car drivers in the world. They absolutely can run cleanly, they just choose not to.

Last week I wrote how happy I was that Talladega was an exciting race that didn’t see a ton of massive crashes. In fact, there have been more lead changes than any of the other crash-filled superspeedway events this season. All the riders were running smarter. It is possible for them to do so. So why don’t they?

Well, in Formula 1 the sanctioning body can determine that teams have violated the ‘spirit of the rules’, that a certain design or tactic may not technically be illegal, but it’s a bit unfair to other teams. There are a lot of things that I think F1 does better than NASCAR. It’s not one of them. There is no “rulebook spirit” in stock car racing, and there shouldn’t be.


My personal racing hero is Smokey Yunick, an engineer who thought if there was no rule against it yet, that meant it was perfectly legal. His mastery of loopholes represents all that is great about American motorsport culture. Think of runners as a gas and regulations as a container. They will expand to fill the space allowed by regulations, every crack and crevice, even if the sanctioning body politely asks them not to.

It’s up to the sanctioning body to write clear regulations with as few cracks and crevices as possible. For example, NASCAR did not define “destroying” someone to include “spinning” them, the loophole through which Byron’s Texas penalty was appealed.

While the phrase itself has fallen into disuse, NASCAR’s party line remains, “Boys, go for it,” former vice president of competition Robin Pemberton called on drivers to self-police in case of intentional contact. But through the Gen 6 era and into Gen 7, standards of conduct have continued to erode. As any student of international politics will tell you (perhaps Front stretchby Alex Gintz), the escalation of a conflict rarely leads to a satisfactory resolution.


The old axiom that NASCAR is the most popular form of motorsport in America due to intentional contact doesn’t quite hold up in a world where Formula 1 regularly attracts more viewers in the key 18- 49 years.

So yes, NASCAR should start penalizing reckless driving again. Certainly destroying (or turning) another driver under yellow should result in their immediate parking for the remainder of the event.

But there’s a fine line to be sure: How do you penalize flagrant contact while still allowing enough kicks and kicks to keep the soul of NASCAR alive? Rubbin’ is racing, after all.


The answer is not so exciting: case by case. Sure, I’d penalize Hamlin for dropping Elliott at Martinsville Speedway in the fall of 2017, but how should I quell Ross Chastain’s bump-and-run on AJ Allmendinger and Alex Bowman at Circuit of the Americas? Maybe they’re a little more forgiving when a win is at stake? Or in low-speed corners with a lot of runoff?

I guarantee it would cause some controversy, at least initially, but if the sanctioning body were to start handing out the occasional penalty for dangerous driving, drivers would back off a bit. The shape of the container would have changed slightly. After realizing they can’t get away with that much, they’ll toe the new line. Winning is everything, and you can’t win if you’ve been penalized.


In the end, that’s what we want, just a little change. NASCAR is not, and never will be, Formula 1. But NASCAR, lately, has been embarrassing itself.

I’ll end on a high note: what I feel is the most accurate rematch in recent NASCAR memory: Hamlin paying off Chastain at Pocono Raceway. As Jeff Burton says, he gave it just enough room to destroy itself.


Some riders have overreacted in their quest for recovery this season. But this? Perfection.

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Willie S. Morrissey
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