Is a 50-point penalty for an attempted intentional wreck on the final lap enough of a deterrent for NASCAR drivers?
Xfinity Series driver Sammy Smith was docked 50 points and fined $25,000 for his move on the last lap of Saturday’s race at Martinsville. Smith was in second on the final lap and drove into Turn 3 with the clear intention to run into race leader Taylor Gray.
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The move did not end well for either driver. Gray spun high into the corner and Smith ended up spinning himself and collecting his JR Motorsports teammate Justin Allgaier. Austin Hill won the race. He was fifth entering Turn 3.
Smith’s move was the crescendo of what had been an ugly and embarrassing display of driving throughout the race. The 250-lap race — which went six extra laps because of a late crash, of course— featured 14 cautions. Twelve of those crashes were for wrecks or spins. After a 54-lap green-flag run to start the race, the longest time between cautions the rest of the way was 20 laps. And there were just four green-flag segments that lasted longer than eight laps.
As it took nearly 2.5 hours to run just over 250 laps at a half-mile track, the quality of racing stunk. And it didn’t go unnoticed. Including by Sunday’s winner of the Cup Series race at Martinsville and two former drivers who are now NASCAR broadcasters.
Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s tweet came before Smith’s move. Earnhardt Jr. owns Smith’s car.
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Saturday’s race somehow made Friday night’s Truck Series race look like a display of driving prowess. That 200-lap race had 10 cautions and eight of those were for spins or crashes.
“We want to see really hard racing and door-to-door racing, and contact is certainly a part of the sport and part of the sport at Martinsville Speedway,” Xfinity Series director Eric Peterson said on NASCAR’s website. “We felt like after looking at all the facts, all the video, the team audio, SMT data and all the tools, we have to work with and review an incident like that. Unfortunately, what Sammy did was over the line and something that we feel like we had to react to. We would prefer to leave it in the driver’s hands but in this case, it wasn’t really a racing move and we reacted to it as such.”
Both lower series races displayed what’s been becoming more and more apparent over the last decade — race craft is a lost art. Especially among younger drivers. There are far too few drivers coming up through the NASCAR ranks who are unafraid to seek out contact. Maybe it’s because many of them haven’t come up through the ranks on a minimal budget and known . Maybe it’s because they’re simply not as good or experienced as drivers in NASCAR’s No. 2 and No. 3 series were years ago. Maybe it’s because they know that NASCAR doesn’t police rough driving stringently.
Maybe it’s all of the above.
NASCAR’s penalty of Smith comes less than a year after Austin Dillon was removed from the Cup Series playoffs for his intentional crash of Joey Logano on the last lap at Richmond. In a similar move, Dillon drove through Logano to get to the checkered flag first and lock his team into the playoffs until that berth was rescinded days later — though Dillon is still officially recognized as the race winner.
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That penalty should have sent a message to drivers in all three series. It clearly didn’t. And it’s hard to see how 50 points to Smith will have an impact either.
Had Smith won the race, it reasons that would have lost the playoff benefits that the win provided like Dillon did. But by penalizing him just 50 points, he’s still 13th in the Xfinity Series standings through seven races and four points out of 10th. Given the depth of the field, he’s still probably going to make the playoffs, either via his place in the points standings or with a win later this year.
Would 100 points have been a better penalty? Smith would be 22nd in that instance. A win would still get him into the playoff field, but he’d have far more drivers to pass in the standings to make it without a visit to victory lane.
It’s also fair to wonder if NASCAR needs to make an example out of someone to get a point across with a one-race suspension or an even harsher penalty. If Dillon’s penalty isn’t deterring drivers from intentionally wrecking a driver in that fashion, then something more needs to be done. NASCAR’s product at any of its three levels isn’t sustainable if its drivers are unafraid of the consequences of their actions. What unfolded ahead of the Cup Series race at Martinsville was embarrassing.
