It’s hard to argue that the finish of Saturday’s (March 29) Marine Corps 250 at Martinsville Speedway was a good one.
If you missed it, the race ended with an overtime restart. Sammy Smith held point with Brandon Jones to his outside and Taylor Gray behind him. Smith had already moved Gray out of the way once to take the lead before the final caution flag flew for a spinning Matt DiBenedetto.
Smith muscled Gray out of the groove on that pass and was maybe a little rough on him, but it wasn’t egregious. With two laps to decide the race, Gray returned the favor on the restart, though he was actually a bit cleaner than Smith had been.
Gray took the lead with the move, and had it ended there, it would have been absolutely fine. If Smith had pushed Gray up the track just enough to try and squeeze under, it would have been fine.
But Smith made no attempt to pass Gray cleanly before slamming into his bumper, sending Gray spinning into traffic and collecting several other cars, including Jones and Justin Allgaier, who had restarted in fourth, along with multiple others who hadn’t been in the mix at all.
Austin Hill restarted fifth and was the first one to make it through the pileup for the victory.
There had been plenty of other spins and cautions on the day, but they were more typical inexperienced drivers vs. Martinsville incidents. The final crash? That was intentional.
Should Smith be penalized? That will see plenty of debate this week, and while he should, it’s already a case of too little, too late as he’ll keep his finish. Mid-week penalties lack punch for incidents like this one.
The sport saw a similar incident in the NASCAR Cup Series last year when Austin Dillon turned both Joey Logano and Denny Hamlin to win at Richmond Raceway in a last-ditch attempt at a playoff berth.
Dillon was allowed to keep the win, but NASCAR deemed it ineligible for a playoff spot. Since Smith didn’t win at Martinsville, any penalty handed out is unlikely to carry much clout.
There used to be a code of ethics among drivers: race others the way they race you and try to make a clean pass, a bump-and-run for a win is OK, but turning the other car isn’t. Recently, particularly in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck and Xfinity Series, certain races have become lawless free-for-alls.
And NASCAR shoulders a big chunk of blame.
It’s easy to push the onus onto a new breed of driver, one whose rides come as much because of a sponsor’s check as hard work and grinding it out on the racetrack, and that is a part of the problem. Drivers who start at the bottom will learn some hard lessons from the competition along the way.
But what happened on Saturday, or last year at Richmond—those aren’t just driver problems. NASCAR put them in the position they’re in.
With the emphasis on the playoffs that begins at Daytona International Speedway in February, there is huge pressure to make the championship battle. It doesn’t just come from NASCAR with the current rules that wins equal playoffs, but from team owners and sponsors.
Television doesn’t give airtime to drivers outside the playoffs unless they win races during them, and even then, it’s begrudging and cursory, like they somehow messed up the script by ousting a championship contender from the limelight. For sponsors, that means the return on their investment is lower during the final weeks of the season, and when those sponsor dollars are essential to teams to have any hopes of a title, teams will do whatever it takes to get there.
When the playoffs start, things don’t exactly calm down. Particularly in the cut-off races, drivers often get in over their heads or get overly aggressive. It’s especially prevalent in Trucks and Xfinity, but Cup isn’t immune.
Under the current point system, finishing second is meaningless. Stage finishes and playoff points lessen the sting, but playoff points are meaningless to non-playoff teams, and wins are the only way to make sure they count.
While finishing second week in and week out reaps benefits and could pave the path to the regular season title and the playoff points that come with it, it won’t guarantee a spot in the next round, or the next, or the championship race.
The premium NASCAR has put on winning isn’t necessarily wrong—the goal of racing is, and always will be, to win. There’s nothing like that winning celebration. It’s the emphasis on needing to win as an entry fee to a larger pressure cooker of a contest that has hurt the racing.
The sanctioning body took a stand on retaliatory crashes, but they’ve even backed off of that more recently, swapping from a driver suspension to a point fine.
And make no mistake, NASCAR is getting what it wants from finishes like Saturday’s. They make people talk about the races. Fans talk about wild finishes. They also talk about the great ones, which the crash-fests are not, and to NASCAR and its advertisers, that makes them the same thing.
When asked, NASCAR will say that it doesn’t glorify crashes, but when crashes appear in every highlight reel and commercial, even those produced by NASCAR, those words ring hollow. There is a faction of fans who tune in for the wrecks, so NASCAR, along with the television partners, has an interest in not really deterring them.
NASCAR also has an interest in not having finishes like Saturday’s. Not only did the race produce a winner who shouldn’t have won, but Smith crossed a line in his handling of the battle for the win.
Look, rubbin’ is, and always will be, racin’. Smith rubbed Gray, Gray rubbed him back, and those moves were fine. But Smith took it too far; rubbin’ is racin’, blatant wrecking without so much as an attempt at a clean pass, not so much.
NASCAR needs to step in on this type of racing, but don’t be surprised if any punishment lacks real teeth. Because NASCAR helped create the issue and doesn’t seem ready to admit that it’s become a bit of a monster.
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.