Joey Logano Echoes Dale Jr.’s Demand to NASCAR Amid Richmond Controversy

The controversial final act of last Sunday’s Cup Series race at Richmond has attracted conflicting opinions from various parties these last few days. Denny Hamlin jumped the final restart and clinched the victory ahead of his teammate Martin Truex Jr. and NASCAR failed to call it despite acknowledging the rule infringement.

Following the race day, Dale Earnhardt Jr. came down hard on the sanctioning body for their admission and subsequent reasoning for inaction. Responding to Elton Sawyer’s [NASCAR VP – Competition] comments about a penalty not being given due to the waning stage of the race in which the restart came, he said on his podcast that Hamlin must’ve been penalized regardless of what lap the rule was broken on.

His words were: “To come out and say, I think if it happened on lap 10, we’d have called it differently. That makes me even more angry. Why are you calling differently depending on the laps? The rule in the book is black and white. It’s on or off. It’s yes or no. It doesn’t change at lap 4 or 50 or lap 5.”

Echoing Dale Jr.’s thoughts, former Cup Series champion Joey Logano has expressed a similar take on Sawyer’s reasoning. He spoke on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio about the controversy and provided his views.

Joey Logano follows Dale Jr. in hitting back at NASCAR for poor reasoning

The NASCAR rulebook is pretty black and white when it comes to restart guidelines. This is what puts Hamlin’s move and Sawyer’s explanation on the wrong side of the fence. Speaking on the radio, Logano had the same question as Dale Jr. did. Why was the promotion calling decisions differently based on which stage the race was in?

“If it’s a call at lap 300, it should be a call at lap 397. It should be the same,” he said. “There’s more to time review after the race than during the race. I know that. You got all the time in the world afterward. You can review the restart, the race can be over, and you’ve got ten minutes to look at it if you want to before you make the call.”

Continuing, he clarified that he just wanted the rules to be the same every week and at every point of the race. He concluded that he was okay with the verdict on Hamlin as long as there was consistency from NASCAR on the matter.