Front Row Motorsports' Zane Smith was given the wave around during Sunday's Jack Link's 500 NASCAR Cup Series race at Talladega Superspeedway when he should not have been, according to the NASCAR rulebook.
NASCAR correctly prevented Joe Gibbs Racing's Denny Hamlin from getting the wave around under the same conditions, but Smith ended up taking advantage of the mistake and going on to finish in a season-high fifth. Hamlin got back on the lead lap later in the race but could only salvage a 15th place result.
While it was indeed a mistake, NASCAR had no way of adjusting it after the race; they couldn't retroactively strip Smith of his fifth place finish when the mistake was theirs to begin with.
Smith is tied for 20th in the point standings, 43 points below the cut line, and it's unlikely that he will qualify for the "Chase" postseason with a top 16 finish in the standings.
However, the extra points he ended up scoring because of NASCAR's oversight ultimately cost several other drivers.
NASCAR's mistake could come back to bite
And the one extra point that several drivers could have and should have gained could prove crucial in the battle to qualify for the playoffs.
Just look at Team Penske's Austin Cindric. He finished Sunday's 188-lap Jack Link's 500 around the four-turn, 2.66-mile (4.281-kilometer) high-banked Lincoln, Alabam oval in eighth place.
He is now four points ahead of Joe Gibbs Racing's Chase Briscoe for the 16th and final spot in the provisional playoff picture. But he should really be five points ahead after a seventh place finish.
Briscoe finished 29th, eight laps off the lead lap due to crash damage, so Smith still would have been ahead of him in the running order had NASCAR actually enforced their own rules properly.
What happens if the difference between someone like Cindric, who effectively lost a point due to NASCAR's oversight, and another driver like Briscoe, who was unaffected by the mistake and didn't lose anything (and thus recorded a net gain of one point over somebody like Cindric), ends up being a single point?
Let's say, for instance, that Cindric is now tied with Briscoe, instead of being four points ahead. Briscoe would own the tiebreaker for that 16th and final spot, as his season-best runner-up finish at EchoPark Speedway (Atlanta Motor Speedway) is better than Cindric's season-high fifth at Darlington Raceway.
But without NASCAR's mistake, it would actually be Cindric ahead by one point, effectively changing the playoff field.
We've been saying since the new points-based postseason format was announced in January that every point matters, and while the statistical likelihood of this point messing with a completely unrelated driver's season isn't particularly high, especially with 16 races remaining on the regular season schedule over the next four months, we have seen extremely narrow margins, even ties, decide who advances and who doesn't in the past.
It could happen here, and it could happen because of NASCAR's mistake. Let's hope it doesn't come down to that.
Sunday's Wurth 400 is race number 11 on the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series schedule, and it is set to be shown live on Fox Sports 1 from Texas Motor Speedway beginning at 3:30 p.m. ET. Start a free trial of FuboTV and don't miss it!
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