Did he stay or did he go? After a caution flew for a spinning Kyle Larson with just a handful of laps remaining in the 2024 Toyota Owners 400 at Richmond Raceway, some drivers had a second chance.
Martin Truex Jr. had a solid lead, and while both Joey Logano and Denny Hamlin were chipping away at his lead, Truex looked to have the race in hand as the leaders worked through lapped traffic.
But when Bubba Wallace got into Larson and sent Larson around, the caution would, at the very least, close the gap on a restart. Instead, when the leaders came to pit road for tires, Hamlin beat Truex out of the pits. And in a two-lap overtime shootout, Hamlin drove away to the win.
But was the restart clean?
At first, there was no thought otherwise—the FOX broadcast didn’t show the cars coming to the restart zone.
Then came questions: was the restart clean? Did Hamlin jump the start and go too early? Did Truex lay back to make it look like that?
In the clip, Hamlin moved about three-quarters of a car length ahead of Truex by the time he entered the restart zone, which is marked on the track. In this view, it’s pretty apparent that Truex doesn’t back up because the cars behind him don’t stack up.
That leaves us with Hamlin jumping the start.
Here’s the restart from Truex’s in-car camera.
Hamlin certainly appears to accelerate before the zone.
From Hamlin’s in-car:
It’s not as obvious, but it’s still there.
Yeah, Hamlin went early.
Why, then, did NASCAR allow it, declining a full review, though the sanctioning body said it looked at the tape?
The conspiracy theories got laid on pretty thick on social channels afterward: NASCAR favored Toyota. NASCAR favored Joe Gibbs Racing. Hamlin is the Golden Boy for NASCAR this year. NASCAR didn’t want Team Penske/Ford/Logano/Truex to win.
It’s probably a whole lot simpler than that.
It was an overtime restart and NASCAR missed the boat. What should have happened was an immediate yellow flag as soon as Hamlin restarted the race. Two laps at Richmond is not a lot of time to make a call and instead of throwing the flag and taking time to review it correctly, NASCAR missed the opportunity.
NASCAR actually flubbed the whole thing several laps earlier with the Larson caution. Larson spun (no, Wallace didn’t do it intentionally), but gathered it in quickly. He barely lost any track position and didn’t hit anything. Race control was too quick on the yellow (as it had also been with Kyle Busch brushing the wall earlier; so at least there was consistency on that front) and threw a caution it didn’t need.
If that unnecessary caution doesn’t happen, there’s nothing to see here, move along, please.
But because it did, here we are. Hamlin went early; we all saw it. NASCAR either didn’t see it soon enough to do anything about it or chose not to.
If it’s the first, it’s still shame on NASCAR, but it’s harder to make that call after the race is over and everyone has pulled off the track. Well, it’s not really hard, but it does open a can of worms. At that point, all it could have done was disqualify Hamlin and give the win to runner-up Logano. That still would have been the right call, but it feels less right because it was Truex who got screwed by the jump, not Logano.
After all, if Hamlin hadn’t had that extra car length advantage, Truex might have been able to stay with him and pinch him to the bottom longer. It might have affected Truex’s finish.
Had NASCAR caught the jump immediately, there was time to re-rack and try it again.
But was it simply giving Hamlin a little leeway because it was an overtime restart? Former driver Josh Wise says that’s a possibility.
Wait…if it had a hard line?
Except it does. It’s painted on the track.
That’s what fans see—those white lines on the track. That’s where the leader controls the start and can go at any point between them. Fans saw Hamlin go before the first line. Not a lot before, but before. As soon as you paint a line on the racetrack, it becomes a hard line and not a judgement call.
And perception is everything. The rules can’t change because it’s in overtime for a win. The rule is drivers can’t go before the box. It’s not they can go a little before the box if it’s overtime.
NASCAR has to stand pat on the rules whether it is the first lap or the last one. NASCAR has taken positions for dropping below the yellow on a superspeedway on the last lap for a position, and this is absolutely no different.
If you paint a line on the track, it has to be a hard line.
Let me say that again: if you paint a literal line on the track, fans see that line, and you have to enforce that line. Speed zones on pit road, the yellow line on a speedway, the restart zone—these should be indisputable and enforced as such. You can’t have a literal line in the sand and then differentiate whether someone crossed it by a toe or a city bus length.
In this day and age, NASCAR has the data from the cars. It would be easy to see if Hamlin accelerated too soon—or if he didn’t. So, why not show it and, if you think Hamlin’s move looked legit, prove it?
In an era where NASCAR can tell if a crewman’s foot touches the ground a fraction of a second too early on pit road, surely there’s a better way to review a restart than to rely on what it looked like.
There should not be any grey area here: Hamlin jumped or he didn’t. Everything fans have seen says he jumped. The only thing that didn’t jump was NASCAR’s finger on the caution the second Hamlin did—the one thing that should have.
Amy is an 20-year veteran NASCAR writer and a six-time National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) writing award winner, including first place awards for both columns and race coverage. As well as serving as Photo Editor, Amy writes The Big 6 (Mondays) after every NASCAR Cup Series race. She can also be found working on her bi-weekly columns Holding A Pretty Wheel (Tuesdays) and Only Yesterday (Wednesdays). A New Hampshire native whose heart is in North Carolina, Amy’s work credits have extended everywhere from driver Kenny Wallace’s website to Athlon Sports. She can also be heard weekly as a panelist on the Hard Left Turn podcast that can be found on AccessWDUN.com's Around the Track page.