In deciding to suspend Austin Hill, and all the championship implications that come with it, NASCAR reviewed on-board telemetry and all video evidence.
Hill was suspended for one NASCAR Xfinity Series race, this weekend at Iowa Speedway, for intentionally crashing Aric Almirola last weekend in the Pennzoil 250 at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. As a result, Hill will also lose all of the playoff points he accumulate during the regular season and will start the playoffs as a lower seed despite his three victories thus far.
There was some argument, including from team owner Richard Childress, that Hill should not be suspended because Austin Cindric was not sat down for a race after a similar right rear hook of Ty Dillon (grandson of Childress) at Circuit of the Americas in April.
However, NASCAR’s managing director of racing communications, Mike Forde, detailed on Wednesday’s episode of his officially sanctioned ‘Hauler Talk‘ podcast that they were not apples to oranges infractions.
“As I’m sure he listened to when we broke the news of the Austin Cindric penalty, we do view these a little bit different,” Forde said. “Largely, it had to do with the track type. Little slower speeds, tighter confines — that’s why we landed on 50 points and a $50,000 fine. … Some people felt he should have gotten a one-race suspension [and] that’s totally fair. This one, we viewed the same way we viewed Bubba Wallace and Kyle Larson at Vegas a couple years ago, Chase Elliott and Denny Hamlin at Charlotte last year or the year before. High speeds, right rear hooking, into the wall, very dangerous situation.
“So, we view that more at the level of a high-speed oval and how we’ve handled that in the past at those types of racetracks. Both of those also resulted in one-race suspensions.”
This is in addition to NASCAR immediately holding Hill for five laps on pit road immediately after the incident.
Amanda Ellis, NASCAR’s Senior Director of Racing Communications, explained the reasoning behind the initial penalty on the same episode as well.
“The reasoning for that is, first of all, we have done that in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series a couple of times in recent years,” Ellis said. “And those drivers were held for two laps. When you move up a series, and you’re in the Xfinity Series, you will often see that penalty be escalated.
“That was the case of this. We felt like we kind of had that penalty before, and we felt like it needed to be escalated in this incident to show that NASCAR was not okay with what happened. Additionally, it was just a situation where I think after some conversations last year, there is a reason that NASCAR wants to react to these things quicker. We will still always review things on Tuesdays. That is something we are always going to do. But I do believe that there’s some want to react to things when we feel like we know what’s right, and this was one of those situations.”
Ultimately, Ellis said the decision to suspend was a straightforward one given the details.
“We had multiple camera views to determine very confidently this was an intentional spin,” Ellis said. “Based on the camera views, we were very confident, very quickly that was something he did.”
