It's Time for NASCAR, Drivers to Rethink Win-At-All-Cost Mentality

• Austin Dillon kicked off a firestorm when he took out leaders Joey Logano and Denny Hamlin on the last lap at Richmond on his way to the win.

• NASCAR took away the playoff-qualifying portion of the win and ruled that Dillon's actions were "detrimental to stock car auto racing" per the NASCAR rule book.

• Richard Childress Racing on Wednesday will present its case as to why Dillon should regain his playoff position.

Two races remain in the NASCAR Cup Series regular season and four playoff positions are available, but that landscape could change if Richard Childress Racing wins its appeal.

Currently, Chris Buescher is 15 points above the cutline, while Ross Chastain is one point to the good and Bubba Wallace is one below the cutline.

However, all of that could change with an appeals panel decision on Wednesday. That’s when Richard Childress Racing will present its case as to why Austin Dillon should regain his playoff position. Quick review. On the final lap at Richmond, Dillon booted leader Joey Logano into a spin, then hit Denny Hamlin, knocking him into the wall as they charged to the checkered flag.

NASCAR allowed Dillon to keep the victory, but said he wasn’t playoff eligible and took 25 drivers points and owner points from the organization.

Stock car racing has been a contact sport since its beginning, and the bump-and-run was expected at Bristol before its redesign. In fact, at that tough short track it was the only way to pass. Throughout the sport’s history, it’s always been viewed as anything goes on the final lap; you do what you have to do to win. That’s what Dillon did. It was a culture in which he was raised.

Prior to corporate America’s entrance into the sport in the 1980s, drivers didn’t have guaranteed salaries. The norm was for drivers to receive 40 percent of their winnings and the team owners 60 percent. If a driver wanted to pay his bills and feed his family, he had better do what it took to win. It was even difficult for them to get a mortgage because they didn’t have a guaranteed annual salary, no health insurance, basically no financial security. It was a much rougher sport.

Throughout my career, I’ve watched several drivers either spin or move other competitors out of the way to win a race. The first thing that came to my mind at the end of the Richmond race was Dale Earnhardt hitting Terry Labonte at the end of two different Bristol events. Labonte’s crashed race car won the 1995 encounter but not the one in 1999. Earnhardt’s famous quote from that incident was that he didn’t mean to wreck him, he was just going to “rattle his cage.”

I even saw Earnhardt intentionally spin Greg Sacks at Charlotte so he could get a caution to get back a lost lap. Earnhardt went on to win that race and when asked about the incident in his post-race interview he said, “I might have been again’em, but I didn’t hit him.”

Rusty Wallace spun Darrell Waltrip to win the 1989 All-Star race. Curtis Turner wasn’t nicknamed “Pops” because of his age, and Ralph Earnhardt once knocked a competitor into a dug out on a baseball field dirt track at McCormick Field in Asheville.

In that rough-and-tumble era of stock car racing, cars were bigger, had a crush factor and no one could race before they were 16 years old. A driver’s license was required. There was no such thing as a 14-year-old racer driving a Late Model.

Today, the cars are smaller, they are more rigid, the drivers are younger, and NASCAR has more data to use in determining what occurred. Officiating is no longer limited to video and photography as it was in the 20th Century.

When Dillon clipped Hamlin’s right rear at Richmond, the right side of Hamlin’s Toyota pancaked the outside wall. Crew chief Chris Gabehart said NASCAR’s SMT data confirmed it was one of the hardest hits in the three years of the current car. Hamlin took a 32g hit, the highest recorded in the Gen-7 era. The hit at Pocono that ended Kurt Busch’s career was a 30g spike on impact.

“Every time you have a significant enough incident that warrants a further look into the incident data recorder, NASCAR will send you the data for that incident,” Gabehart said on SIRIUSXM NASCAR Radio. “Joe Gibbs Racing has had 21 of those instances in the Gen-7 era. Twenty-one times we’ve gotten data from a crash from one of our four cars.”

I am highly competitive, and I’ve always said I would never condemn a driver for doing something I know I would have done in the same situation. If I had been in Dillon’s position with a playoff berth on the line, yes, I would have done what he did. However, with the numerous drivers I have seen killed, critically injured, or dealing with Alzheimer’s in their older years due to head injuries, perhaps it is time to rethink the attitude that you do what you have to do to win.