Austin Dillon will keep his win from Sunday night’s Cup race at Richmond Raceway, but it will not count toward the driver’s or car owner’s playoff eligibility, NASCAR said Wednesday afternoon.
The move leaves Dillon and the No. 3 team without a playoff spot with three races left in the regular season.
NASCAR also announced that Dillon was deducted 25 points and the team also lost 25 car owner points. NASCAR also announced that spotter Brandon Beseech, who yelled at Dillon to destroy a competitor, was suspended for the next three Cup races.
“The most important thing is we want to make sure we protect the integrity of our playoffs and the championship when we get to Phoenix,” Elton Sawyer, NASCAR’s senior vice president of competition, told reporters Wednesday.
“We want to make sure our competitors understand that we want them to make all the decisions, that we want them to be able to ride hard. That’s what our sport has been about for over 75 years, but we also want them to understand – and I think every single one of them understands – that this has gone too far.”
Sawyer said NASCAR reviewed SMT data, in-car camera footage and team radio audio before making the decision. He would not say whether one action by Dillon was worse than the other when he destroyed both Joey Logano and Denny Hamlin on the final lap to win.
“We looked at everything as a whole, what happened there when the (No.) 3 entered Turn 3 and made contact with (Logano) … and the contact that occurred coming out of the corner with (Dillon) and (Hamlin).”
Dillon won at Richmond after making contact with Logano and Hamlin on the final lap. Dillon rear-ended Logano, sending Logano’s car into the wall. Dillon then made contact with the right rear of Hamlin’s car, sending it into the wall before he saw the checkered flag.
Sawyer said officials considered stripping him of the win, but the Cup rulebook does not provide a “mechanism” for doing so. He also said series officials considered suspending him – as they did with Chase Elliott in 2023 and Bubba Wallace in 2022 when they wrecked a competitor by hooking the right rear – but decided against it because the penalty imposed was severe enough.
Dillon’s penalty means 12 drivers have clinched a playoff spot with a win, leaving four spots on points. Instead of Wallace holding the final playoff spot, Chris Buescher moves into that position due to a tiebreaker with Ross Chastain. The next round of the series is Sunday at Michigan International Speedway (2:30 p.m. ET on USA Network).
Sawyer also explained why this decision took so long and was not made after the race.
“Ultimately we want to and will get to a point where we make this more on the fly, so to speak,” Sawyer said. “We wanted to make sure that the most important thing in these decisions is to get it right. To make a split-second decision and have it wrong, that would be bad of us. As stewards, given the time it took to get it right in this case, it was more important to take the time to get it right than to make a quick decision. But I would say it puts us in a position where we’re thinking carefully about how we could have done this much quicker.”
Dillon gave his commentary on the final lap after the race on Sunday evening in Richmond.
“I let go of Joey and downshifted to get back to the left,” Dillon said after the race about the contact with the two drivers. “(Hamlin) comes over. I’m completely free at the point when he comes over. I’m trying to get to the start/finish line first.”
Dillon continued, “I just look at the start/finish line. That’s all. I don’t hear any (swear word) at that point, you know? Your eyes go red. You see red, you get to the end of the race. Daytona, last lap, when I won the 500 there, your eyes see red.
“You only have one thing on your mind: you have to be the first to the start/finish line, period. It doesn’t matter if someone has called you on the radio, it doesn’t matter. You only have one job to do: you have to be the first to the start/finish line.
“Many people lose their jobs because they don’t get to the start/finish line first.”
NASCAR let the results stand Sunday night, although Sawyer told reporters after the race that Dillon’s conduct was “appallingly close.”
When asked whether Dillon should be stripped of his win, Hamlin said on his Actions Detrimental podcast this week: “Basically, you can tell anyone that we don’t see this as a racing incident, we see this as intentional. It changed the outcome of the race, so that person didn’t deserve to win.”
NASCAR also announced that Logano was fined $50,000 for the mini-burnout he suffered after the race with team members and others on pit road in Dillon’s pit area.
