I pegged the chance that NASCAR would take away Austin Dillon’s win at Richmond in Sunday’s Cook Out 400 at 0.001 percent, and technically, I wasn’t wrong.
But in effect, Dillon, who plowed through race leaders Joey Logano and Denny Hamlin within start of the finish line on the final lap to get the win, might as well have had the win taken away.
On Wednesday, NASCAR announced that the W will not count toward Dillon’s eligibility for the 2024 NASCAR playoffs, and docked his team 25 points in the playoff standings, knocking him from 26th to 31st.
The much bigger issue than the points is the win not counting toward playoff eligibility. There are still three races left in the 2024 regular season, but the reason, you can assume, that Dillon and his team were so keen on winning at Richmond when the opportunity was there was, the opportunity hasn’t been there all that often for Dillon’s team in 2024.
Dillon hadn’t led a lap all season until Sunday’s race at RIR, and he has just two other Top 10 finishes in 2024, with an average finish of 23.5.
The move to, in essence, dock the win is the right one, but the precedent set here by NASCAR is, to say the least, shocking, in terms of it being unexpected.
“As we looked at it, the No. 1 thing is that we want to make sure that we are protecting the integrity of our playoffs as well as our championship when we get to Phoenix,” said Elton Sawyer, NASCAR’s senior vice president of competition. “We want to make sure that our competitors understand that we want them to make all the decisions, we want them to be able to race hard, that’s what our sport has been about for 75-plus years. But we also want them to understand, and I believe that each and every one of them understands that this crossed the line.”
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Chris Graham
