After Saturday’s (March 29) NASCAR Xfinity Series race at Martinsville Speedway, fans felt as though Sammy Smith, the driver of the No. 8 Chevrolet Camaro for JR Motorsports, went entirely too far in his bump-and-run of Taylor Gray as the two raced to the checkered flag.
Neither won the race, but they more than likely would have finished 1-2 if Smith hadn’t made the move – a move that can only be defined as intentional, especially after Smith’s post-race comments.
NASCAR doled out a $25,000 fine and docked Smith 50 driver points for the incident, which is on par with other penalties of the sort.
However, those penalties haven’t seemed to deter the actual problem, and NASCAR Cup Series driver Brad Keselowski offered a solution.
“The solution needs to come from the car owners not NASCAR,” Keselowski said via X on Sunday. “Until the car owners are willing to park their drivers for getting this out of control, very little will change. I get that they are all scared to park a funded driver out of fear they will lose the money to continue to operations. However, at some point, that’s the risk you have to take to get this right. I believe if all of the teams do it together, it would work.”
Does he have a point? That’s for us at Frontstretch to discuss this week.
The Solution Should Come From Those Who Permitted It
There’s no need to break down what happened last Saturday like the Zapruder film to gauge if Smith was in the right, exacting revenge against Gray for having the audacity to gently guide him up out of the groove to get by. NASCAR did ultimately fine him $25,000 and 50 points, but that can and likely will be quickly overcome by Smith and the No. 8 JRM team prior to the playoffs starting at Bristol in September.
What I’m more concerned about – and what seems to be the prevailing sentiment of drivers lately – is this mindset that they have been wronged, and that if everyone else must suffer because of it, so be it.
This isn’t, as Denny Hamlin would say, “just short track racin’…” – this is narcissism on full display. It’s doing nothing but reducing all three series to the lowest common denominator, and will get somebody hurt at one of the larger tracks pretty soon if it’s not addressed by the sanctioning body.
Brad Keselowski offered his opinion after having had a couple of days to ruminate on it.
Keselowski is someone whose opinion I put a significant value on – particularly in a matter such as this. He was involved in a couple of retaliations from Carl Edwards in 2009 and 2010 – both of which could have seen him be seriously injured. While owners should absolutely put their foot down, it’s only being done because NASCAR refuses to do so – which is beyond puzzling.
This is not something that was tolerated in the ’80s and ’90s.
Dale Earnhardt was involved in some skirmishes with Darrell Waltrip and Geoff Bodine – both of which seem downright tame by today’s standards. And while Earnhardt and his car owner had a pretty chummy relationship with the owner of the sanctioning body, even Bill France, Jr. had his limits of what he was going to tolerate on his racetracks.
There was the occasional fracas that would occur during the 2000s, which would see owners get involved to put an end to things. Jack Roush notoriously threatened to fine his drivers and dock them their pay to cover the cost of wrecked racecars. Granted, it was a different era – but it was also the pinnacle of the sport’s popularity.
Somewhere during the Brian France era, it was determined that NASCAR’s goal was to create Game 7/SportsCenter highlight reel moments. The casual fan needed to see action and drama, we were told, for the sport to rebound to the heights that NASCAR enjoyed just a few years earlier. Now, we’ve jumped the shark and have gone down the rabbit hole of chasing the lowest common denominator:
Smash ‘em up, county-fair-derby-style finishes. How many decades did people labor to sell NASCAR beyond lurid spins, flips and crashes?
You can point and fire in any direction and hit one of the culprits: a gimmicky championship format that deems win and you’re in – even if you’re 18th in points and generally uncompetitive.
Maybe it’s social media stardom in TikToks or Instagram reels, and a new generation of drivers that have backgrounds and stories that are as compelling as most resumés from students fresh out of college.
That is to say, they are decidedly unimpressive and boring.
While the car owners and sponsors certainly have a say in the matter, the ones who can ultimately fix this are the ones that created this in the first place. While I typically scoff and recoil at stick-and-ball sport analogies, it’s no different than the NFL permitting certain celebrations, helmet-to-helmet contact or knee injuries stemming from tackling instructions.
Unless there’s a line drawn in the sand and drivers are parked for wiping out the field from reckless actions, it’s not going to get better. Whether it’s Martinsville, Daytona or road courses, multiple cautions in the final 20 laps where huge swaths of cars are eliminated are absolutely preventable.
They just need to exercise their power and park people for reckless behavior. – Vito Pugliese
It All Comes Down To Who Signs The Checks
While my good friend Vito is typically against analogies from other sports, he used a good one here. But I’m going to take it one step further.
In any league of professional athletics, the governing body certainly does hold some power. After all, they put on the games, the races, handle the TV deals and, above all else, have their name on the product. Such is the case in NASCAR and that cannot be overstated.
However, when a player (or in this case, a driver) inks a deal with any team, whose name signs those checks? Is it the France family? Does it say “NASCAR” across the dotted line?
No. In this case, it essentially says JR Motorsports. The team cuts the checks to Smith, just like each driver gets paid by their respective team, because that’s how sports work.
Take the college model, for example, which is now essentially a professional league of its own. While the NCAA has its penalties and decrees, who handles most of the disciplinary action within a team? The coach. Keselowski has it right. Until the owners decide to put their foot down and penalize their drivers for abusing the equipment that they pay for, none of this is going to get any better.
Fifty driver points is nothing to scoff at, believe me, but $25,000 is significantly less when thinking about how much cash someone needs on hand just to go racing for one weekend, much less an entire season.
And when it comes to points, Smith is in a rocket ship of a car compared to the vast majority of the field. Additionally, he’s got some talent. He will be fine in the grander points scheme come season’s end. Essentially, this penalty is a slap on the wrist. Nothing more, nothing less, and this incident cost not only JRM a boatload of money, but also plenty of other teams who could use that cash much more.
I’m also glad Vito brought up Jack Roush, who famously would dock driver pay to cover damages that they caused to the equipment if their actions were deemed egregious, which we can all agree is the right terminology for Smith and Gray’s snafu.
The thing is, that was when NASCAR was at its best.
Owners demanded accountability out of their drivers. They were seen as investments, which is exactly what players are seen as by management across all professional sports. The problem now, though, is that some of the drivers believe they are more than just that. It seems that some of them have forgotten who actually pays the bills, and if someone like Brad Keselowski, who now pays his own bills, is saying that this should be the way forward, it deserves a listen.
NASCAR may have been hitting drivers in their pocket books with a $25,000 fine 20 years ago. Now, though, that’s essentially chump change, and it doesn’t look like NASCAR itself is going to change its penalty model any time soon.
Therefore, if the problem is really going to be fixed, it has to start with who signs the dotted line, and maybe then drivers will think about their actions a bit harder before bumping someone so hard they both lose the race. – Tanner Marlar
Tanner Marlar is a staff writer for Sports Illustrated’s OnSI Network, a contributor for TopSpeed.com, an AP Wire reporter, an award-winning sports columnist and talk show host and master's student at Mississippi State University. Soon, Tanner will be pursuing a PhD. in Mass Media Studies. Tanner began working with Frontstretch as an Xfinity Series columnist in 2022.
Vito is one of the longest-tenured writers at Frontstretch, joining the staff in 2007. With his column Voice of Vito (monthly, Fridays) he’s a contributor to several other outlets, including Athlon Sports and Popular Speed in addition to making radio appearances. He forever has a soft-spot in his heart for old Mopars and presumably oil-soaked cardboard in his garage.