Even though Ryan Blaney’s penalty has been rescinded after he was disqualified from the race at Las Vegas, how NASCAR is going about their way when it comes to penalizing those who break the rules, it’s a massive change from how things were not that long ago. This was something that Denny Hamlin pointed to.
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During the recent episode of his podcast show, Actions Detrimental, the Joe Gibbs Racing driver opened up on how the state of affairs was between rule breakers and NASCAR about a decade ago, and how things are now.
Not only that, Hamlin also applauded NASCAR for their new way of going about things of this nature, even though he himself was caught on the wrong side of it last year after his DQ at Pocono.
Denny Hamlin cheers NASCAR for their strict rule enforcement
Speaking about the Ryan Blaney situation, Hamlin claimed he wasn’t aware of how long or short the illegal (later deemed legal) part on Blaney’s #12 Mustang was, but what was perfectly clear was NASCAR’s intent. “It wasn’t the specified length that’s what NASCAR said, you broke the rules and you get DQ’d. That’s what they’re doing. Go NASCAR! Doing a great job,” Hamlin said.
“I can give you a NASCAR 101 from ten years ago, fifteen years ago. They’d say, ‘Hey, don’t do that. Don’t do that again.’ They would let so much stuff go that was blatantly wrong, but they were apprehensive to lay down big penalties because they didn’t like the bad pub’ and all that. Not anymore.”
“They’re like, ‘We don’t care who you are, what you’re doing, don’t mess with this Next Gen car. We give you the rules. Play those rules and if you don’t, you’re gonna get DQ’d.'”
NASCAR’s statement after they reversed the DQ decision on Ryan Blaney
After the race in Vegas, Ryan Blaney was stripped of his 6th place position and handed a disqualification that left him in 36th place. However, later NASCAR announced they were somewhat wrong in their post-race inspection, leading to Blaney getting back his initial 6th place result.
As for their statement, NASCAR said, “After further review of the inspection process throughout this weekend’s events at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, NASCAR has rescinded the No. 12 disqualification penalty. Monday morning during its race weekend debrief, NASCAR discovered an issue with the damper template used for inspection.”
“NASCAR then conducted a detailed investigation and has restored the No. 12’s stage and race finishing positions from Sunday. NASCAR has taken internal steps to remedy this issue moving forward.”
This was a decision that was welcomed by Team Penske as they applauded NASCAR for dealing with the whole process with a lot of integrity. But would Denny Hamlin also have the same opinion now?
Something to think about.
