Austin Cindric will not be penalized for his contact with Austin Dillon in Sunday’s race at World Wide Technology Raceway after NASCAR determined it was a racing incident.
Cindric and Dillon made contact going into Turn 1 with 22 laps to go. Cindric was in the middle of a three-wide battle with Ricky Stenhouse Jr. on his outside and Dillon on the inside. The contact was in the right rear as Cindric and Dillon came together, turning Dillon into the right and into the path of Stenhouse.
Frustrated by the end of his day, Dillon told the media outside the infield care center that he believed the incident was intentional on Cindric’s part. The Richard Childress Racing driver compared it to Chase Elliott wrecking Denny Hamlin the week before at Charlotte Motor Speedway, which earned Elliott a one-race suspension.
“He’d better be suspended next week,” Dillon said of Cindric.
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Elton Sawyer, NASCAR senior vice president of competition, told SiriusXM NASCAR Radio that the series reviewed the incident and will take no action. NASCAR used the same SMT data in its investigation as with the Elliott and Hamlin incident. The data was still available even though there was an off-site connectivity failure during the race that took the system down and also briefly took Fox Sports (broadcast) and Motor Racing Network (radio) off the air.
“We didn’t have it live, we didn’t have SMT data live, but it was still being recorded in the background, and it was stored,” said Sawyer. “So now the race teams have it, and we have it as well. Looking back at that incident, we didn’t see anything and haven’t seen anything that really would rise to a level that would be a suspension or a penalty. It looked like hard racing, one car coming up a little bit, another car going down.”
Cindric finished 13th in St. Louis and Dillon finished 31st.
Elliott returns from his suspension this weekend at Sonoma Raceway. The former series champion is the second driver NASCAR has suspended in recent months for an intentional right hook after Bubba Wallace’s incident with Kyle Larson in Las Vegas late last season set the precedent.
“As we said last week, we take these incidents very serious when we see cars that are turned head-on into another car or turned head-on into the wall,” Sawyer said. “(We) spent a lot of time looking at that yesterday, looking at all the data, looking at TV footage, and just deemed this one as really hard racing.
“We’re going to have conversation with the two Austins to make sure we’re all in a good place as we move forward to Sonoma. But again, looking at it and taking all the data and resources, we’ll move forward without a penalty on this one.”