NASCAR dug their own hole with Kyle Busch incident fallout

Give credit to NASCAR for being consistent. In one way, at least.

When Denny Hamlin admitted that his goal was to wreck Ross Chastain at Phoenix Raceway in March 2023, NASCAR penalized him via a fine and a points deduction. The penalty came not after the incident itself, but after he had admitted guilt on his podcast.

They took the same approach this past weekend at Texas Motor Speedway, when RFK Racing's Ryan Preece admitted on the radio that he was going to wreck Joe Gibbs Racing's Ty Gibbs, then did exactly that, knocking the driver of the No. 54 Toyota out of the race.

Preece was unable to avoid a penalty, in the form of a $50,000 fine and 25 crucial points in the driver standings. The points penalty dropped him from 63 points ahead of the "Chase" playoff cut line to just 38 points ahead, so the long-term damage might not be done for quite some time.

But Richard Childress Racing's Kyle Busch was not penalized for wrecking Legacy Motor Club's John Hunter Nemechek.

While NASCAR claimed the data did not fully prove that Busch intentionally slammed into Nemechek, just moments after they made contact on the back straightaway which sent Busch into the outside wall when he tried and failed to clear the No. 42 Toyota, the circumstantial evidence should have been enough to make clear that it was not an accident.

As the great Sergeant Vincent Carter once famously said in Gomer Pyle, USMC, circumstantial evidence "can be rough. You see, they got all the evidence, and it's circumstantial!"

Apparently not in NASCAR's case.

Not only did Busch just so happen to come up the race track at the exact time Nemechek was turning into turn three, but he also took to social media to rant about Nemechek's driving, even though Nemechek was never, at any point, in the wrong.

In other words, Busch made his frustration with the initial contact obvious, so one could infer that he was saying the quiet part out loud about the second run-in. And he actually accidentally admitted Nemechek's own innocence with the point he was trying to argue, if you look closely enough.

Again, apparently that wasn't enough to prove intent, and apparently anything shy of "I am now going to wreck this driver" doesn't fit the bill when NASCAR makes their decisions.

Preece was penalized under Sections 4.3 and 4.4.A in the NASCAR Rule Book, which state NASCAR’s member conduct guidelines and specifically list “wrecking or spinning another vehicle, whether or not that vehicle is removed from competition as a result” as an offense which can result in penalty.

Perhaps we can add "penalties can only be enforced if said competitor admits to the crime."

The "whether or not that vehicle is removed from competition as a result" line is also noteworthy, as it proves (or at least should prove) that Preece's penalty wasn't issued simply because Gibbs was knocked out, and Busch didn't avoid one simply because Nemechek still finished 21st.

Masking intent is evidently the smart play

It seems like the only time NASCAR is willing to penalize drivers who don't blatantly admit intent is when it's a right-rear hook, although we'll give them the slight benefit of the doubt here because of the fact that (a) those incidents are inherently far more dangerous and (b) the data on those makes proving intent much easier.

But NASCAR knows darn well what happened at Texas too, based on the fact that they literally plan to "have a talk" with Busch, who also appeared to intentionally wreck Riley Herbst out of frustration at Bristol Motor Speedway over an earlier incident. That too went unpenalized.

What more do they need to see? Another Ron Hornaday?

Again, though, give NASCAR credit for being consistent, to a certain degree. But we'd give them even more credit if they actually used their own rulebook properly, rather then consistently misapplying it, because this continues a worrying trend of drivers needing to admit guilt before NASCAR actually takes action.

Look back to 2019, when Bubba Wallace intentionally spun out to cause a caution flag at Texas because he had a tire going down. NASCAR did nothing.

Then during the week, Wallace admitted that he, among others, would continue to do it until NASCAR actually did something about it. Then and only then did NASCAR penalize him with both a fine and a points penalty, even though his intent was obvious from the start to anybody watching.

It was a moment of "don't mess with us" and "don't dare make us look bad", far more so than it was a moment of "stop doing it".

Skip ahead to 2021. Busch did the same exact thing in a Truck Series race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, and unlike Wallace, he actually benefited a great deal from it. When asked about it after the race, he refused to answer.

"Nope. Nope. Nope." was his exact response when asked to address the matter post-race. NASCAR did nothing.

While wrecking somebody intentionally is a bit different, it's the same concept: NASCAR is drawing the line between penalizable and non-penalizable offenses with the driver's own admission of guilt.

Busch is clearly frustrated, and we don't blame him; Bobby Allison literally has a more recent Cup Series win than he does, which is a tough pill to swallow for a driver who owns the record with 19 consecutive winning seasons.

But while we don't want to completely disregard Busch's side of the story on the Nemechek incident, NASCAR doing absolutely nothing to temper that frustration, which has now resulted in multiple wrecks, is simply no longer good enough.

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