With eight drivers remaining eligible in the next three races in the Round of Eight semifinals – of which only four will eventually emerge for the Championship 4 season and title finale at Phoenix – NASCAR doesn’t want to see any hanky panky.
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So, it has a simple yet very powerful message to its drivers in the remaining four Cup playoff races: DON’T EVEN THINK About Trying To Manipulate a Race’s Outcome.
You can’t get more straightforward than that. It certainly doesn’t want to give teammates an unfair advantage, particularly from drivers who either didn’t qualify for the playoffs this year or are no longer eligible to advance.
And NASCAR isn’t just talking about true teammates that drive for the same team, but also drivers who are, by extension, teammates due to the manufacturer they drive for: Chevrolet, Ford, or Toyota.
There was already suspicion of things like “team orders” this past Sunday at the Charlotte Roval, where Alex Bowman and Cole Custer were suspected of holding their position to help their teammates late in the race – in this case, Bowman helping his three Hendrick Motorsports teammates who remain in the playoffs (Chase Elliott, Kyle Larson and William Byron), as well as Custer helping his Ford teammates, Ryan Blaney and Joey Logano to advance (particularly Logano, who advanced by one mere point, knocking out Ross Chastain).
NASCAR couldn’t be more emphatic that there better not be any funny business in the four remaining races on the schedule as we move closer to crowning a champion.
“At a certain point during this week, we will just remind teams, ‘Let’s not put yourselves or ourselves in jeopardy here,’” NASCAR Managing Director of Communications Mike Forde said on this week’s episode of the Hauler Talk podcast. “Fans should be coming to the racetrack expecting a straight-up race where each position is fought for as hard as possible. If we do see something or hear something we don’t like, we are going to step in.”
That covers participants in all three of NASCAR’s premier series: Cup, Xfinity, and Trucks.
Toby Christie put the situation in a clear-cut fashion:
“But beyond the on-track contact, many drivers and teams had subtle eye-raising strategy calls in the closing laps of the race, including Cole Custer and Alex Bowman, who were running behind (Joey) Logano and (Ross) Chastain, respectively. Both drivers were told to ‘save tires’, which some interpreted as code for not challenging a manufacturer ally driver battling for points to advance into the next round of the Playoffs.”
Forde’s colleague in the NASCAR Communications Department, Amanda Ellis, added, “It’s not a message of you can’t talk about points. It’s a message that if you’re talking about points, it should be about your car, not others that are in play.”
While teams have been pretty good in recent years about not blatantly cheating, the last thing NASCAR wants to have is a repeat of the 2013 summer race in Richmond, when Michael Waltrip Racing and Clint Bowyer were heavily penalized for attempting to manipulate the regular season finale to get Martin Truex Jr. into the playoffs.
There’ve been a few other incidents since then, including last year’s fall race at Martinsville – the last playoff race before the championship-deciding finale the following week in Phoenix – where the teams of Austin Dillon, Ross Chastain, and Bubba Wallace were all heavily penalized for trying to “help” either their respective teams or manufacturer teams.
So if any Cup drivers or teams are thinking about trying to game the game, so to speak, NASCAR has just one very powerful four-letter word for them: “DON’T!”
