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CHRISTIE: NASCAR Playoffs Continue to Deliver... Controversy

Toby Christie

Aaron Giffin | Racing America

We should be talking about another incredible clutch performance by Ryan Blaney at Martinsville Speedway, which locked him into the Championship 4 for the second consecutive season. We should be talking about how the softer Goodyear tires allowed for the best race at Martinsville in the Next Gen car. Unfortunately, we're once again talking about a ruling by NASCAR and questioning a slew of funny shenanigans that took place in the closing laps of Sunday's Xfinity 500 instead.

RELATED: Ryan Blaney Clinches Championship 4 Berth with Martinsville Win
RESULTS: NASCAR Cup Series Xfinity 500 at Martinsville

It's an absolute mess, but it's what we've come to expect in the NASCAR Playoffs.

Let's start with NASCAR's ruling to issue a safety violation to Christopher Bell on the final lap of Sunday's race.

A couple of years ago, Ross Chastain needed a gob of points on the final lap of the penultimate race at Martinsville Speedway if he wanted to advance to the Championship 4. The Trackhouse Racing driver made the conscious decision to go full-speed into the outside wall in Turns 3 and 4 on the final lap to propel himself up the running order.

It worked, and Chastain turned the fastest lap ever recorded at Martinsville Speedway in the process. At the end of the 2022 season, NASCAR officially banned the "Hail Melon". Two years later, Bell became the first driver to suffer a penalty for using a similar move, and the penalty wiped out his Championship 4 berth.

"There was language in the rule back. When you look at it today, [Bell] clearly got up against the fence there in [Turns] 3 and 4, and rode the fence all the way off [Turn] 4 there. Strictly it's to protect our drivers as well as our fans. So yeah, it was pretty straightforward," Elton Sawyer NASCAR Vice President of Competition said in a press conference after the race.

While Sawyer sees the situation as straightforward, was it really? Sure, Bell got into the wall, and once he got into the wall, he stayed into the wall. But let's not get things twisted, this was a very different incident than what we saw from Chastain in 2022.

As Bell's car was sliding up the track, he was scrubbing off speed, seemingly in an effort to miss the outside wall. Once he was into the wall, Bell didn't gain any positions, and you could argue that he didn't gain any time on anyone. It didn't feel like Bell going into the wall seemed like the plan going into the turn of the race, and Bell explained as much in his post-race interviews on pit road.

“No, I mean, I made a mistake and I slid into the wall. And unfortunately, they ruled that as a safety violation, I guess,” Bell stated.

Sawyer said whether Bell meant to do it or not wasn't up for discussion. At the end of the day, the No. 20 car rode the wall, and he felt NASCAR had to make a call.

"Yeah, I'm not going to speculate on what Christopher did or said what he meant to do. That wouldn't be fair to try to make that type of decision based off that," Sawyer said. "We looked at the data. We looked at video. We've been very clear, based off our conversations with our industry, based off that move two years ago, that that would not be tolerated."

The driver of the No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota, who had suffered a rough day on the track, was just happy to have squeaked out a Championship 4 berth, and as he was rolling down pit lane after the race, he had no idea he was even under investigation for anything. He was.

To make matters worse, the decision from NASCAR to bump Bell from the 18th-finishing position to the 22nd-place finishing position due to a move, that didn't gain the driver any positions on track, took nearly 30 minutes to execute. This left everyone, including NBC Sports, who was trying to tell the story of what was happening to the NASCAR fan base, in a fog. Much like the seemingly never-ending decision to grant a waiver to Kyle Larson for missing the Coca-Cola 600 earlier this season, the call took far too long to be announced.

Sawyer says the hold-up was simply because NASCAR wanted to get the call correct rather than make a decision in haste.

"We want to get it right, first and foremost," Sawyer explained. "This is not something that happens every week. We want to be prepared. I thought our team in the tower did exactly what we needed to do. Let's get this right. Fortunately, we don't have it every week. It is something that we'll go back and figure out if we could have made that decision faster, for sure. I didn't know it took -- you could have told me it took five minutes or 55. I don't know."

While we don't have a driver riding the wall every week, it has seemed -- especially this year in the Playoffs -- as if every race has ended with some sort of officiating controversy, which has required Sawyer or NASCAR Cup Series Director Brad Moran to have to explain a ruling. It's become expected at this point, unfortunately.

And we're not even done. There is still the matter of potential race manipulation penalties for Bubba Wallace, Ross Chastain, and Austin Dillon.

Wallace seemingly slowed over the final few laps to allow Bell to gain the 18th position, which Bell needed to tie William Byron's point total in the Playoff standings.

Meanwhile, Byron, whose car had faded on the final run of the race, benefitted from a wall of Chevrolet cars behind him, which included Dillon and Chastain running side-by-side blocking all challengers that attempted to pass the driver of the No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet.

Many expected with the long wait for the decision to penalize Bell that NASCAR had taken the time to look into this situation as well, but Sawyer says that wasn't the case and that NASCAR will dive into the car data, video, and in-car audio to determine if anything nefarious happened in the closing laps at Martinsville Speedway.

If the sanctioning body determines race manipulation did occur, who knows what we may see as far as penalties are concerned. We could potentially see the Championship 4 field altered mid-week ahead of the Championship race at Phoenix. It's a total mess, and frankly, it's embarrassing.

But again, it just feels like in the Playoff format, where a championship is decided in mini-three-race championship rounds, it lends itself to far more shenanigans than the old traditional season-long championship format. Sure, the Playoffs create a ton of excitement, but they also create a ton of controversy and situations that put the sanctioning body in a position to do what they've long struggled to do consistently -- make judgment calls.

While Sawyer and NASCAR brass have continued to state that they like what they're seeing from the Playoff format, it truly feels like the Playoffs idea has run its course.

Published
Toby Christie
TOBY CHRISTIE

Toby Christie is the Editor-in-Chief of Racing America. He has 15 years of experience as a motorsports journalist and has been with Racing America since 2023.

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