A penalty of 50 points for an intentional wreck attempt on the last round sufficient enough deterrence for NASCAR drivers?
The pilot of the Xfinity series, Sammy Smith, was hung at 50 points and sentenced to a fine of $ 25,000 for his move in the last round of the race on Saturday in Martinsville. Smith was second in the last round and entered the turn 3 with the clear intention to meet the leader of the Taylor Gray race.
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The move did not end well for one or the other driver. Gray turned high in the area and Smith ended up turning and collecting his teammate JR Motorsports Justin Allgaier. Austin Hill won the race. He was fifth in the Tour 3.
Smith’s move was the crescendo of what had been a ugly and embarrassing demonstration of driving throughout the race. The 250 rpm race – which made six additional laps due to a late accident, of course – presented 14 warnings. Twelve of these accidents were intended for wrecks or towers. After a 54 -laps green race to start the race, the longest between the claims, the rest of the path was 20 laps. And there were only four green flag segments which lasted more than eight towers.
As it took almost 2.5 hours to run a little over 250 laps on a half-mile track, the quality of the stinking race. And it didn’t go unnoticed. Including by the Sunday winner of the CUP Series Race in Martinsville and two former pilots who are now NASCAR broadcasters.
Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s tweet came before Smith’s move. Earnhardt Jr. has Smith’s car.
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The race on Saturday in a way is racing the series of trucks on Friday evening looks like a demonstration of driving prowess. This 200 -round race had 10 warnings and eight of them concerned tricks or accidents.
“We want to see really difficult races and door door races, and contact is certainly part of the sport and part of the sport in Martinsville Speedway,” said XFINITY series director Eric Peterson, on the NASCAR website. “We had the impression that after watching all the facts, all the videos, the audio of the team, the SMT data and all the tools, we must work and review an incident like this. Unfortunately, what Sammy did was above the line and something we have the impression that we had to react. We would prefer to leave them in the hand of the driver, but in this case, it was not really a racing movement and such. ” In this case, it was not really a race movement and we react there as such.
The two races in the lower series have shown what is becoming more and more apparent in the last decade – Race Craft is a lost art. Especially among young drivers. There are far too few drivers who arrive in the NASCAR ranks who are not afraid to ask for contacts. It may be because many of them have not respected the ranks with a minimum and known budget. It is perhaps because they are simply not as good or experienced as the drivers of the series n ° 2 and n ° 3 of NASCAR years ago. It is perhaps because they know that Nascar does not make rough police officers with rigorously driving.
Maybe that’s all that precedes.
Smith de Nascar’s penalty occurs less than a year after Austin Dillon was removed from the playoff series from the Cup series for his intentional accident by Joey Logano in the last round in Richmond. In a similar decision, Dillon crossed Logano to go to the checkered flag first and enclose his team in the playoffs until this berth was canceled a few days later – although Dillon is still officially recognized as the winner of the race.
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This penalty should have sent a message to the drivers in the three series. This is clearly not the case. And it is difficult to see how 50 points in Smith will have an impact either.
If Smith had won the race, there are reasons that it would have lost the eliminatory advantages that the victory offered as Dillon. But by penalizing it at only 50 points, it is still 13th in the XFINITY series ranking through seven races and four points out of 10th. Given the depth of the field, he will probably always do the playoffs, either via his place in the points classification, or with a victory later this year.
Would 100 points have been a better penalty? Smith would be 22nd in this case. A victory would always put him in the field of the playoffs, but he would have many more drivers to go to the classification to arrive without visit to Victory Lane.
It is also just to wonder if Nascar has to make an example of someone to pass a point with a suspension of an even more severe race or penalty. If Dillon’s penalty does not dissuade drivers from intentionally destroying a driver in this way, then something more should be done. Nascar’s product to one of its three levels is not durable if its engines are not afraid of the consequences of their actions. What happened before the Cup series race in Martinsville was embarrassing.
