After Sunday’s NASCAR race in Kansas, all eyes were on Ross Chastain and Noah Gragson after they were shown in a heated exchange following the race.
Gragson was upset after Chastain gave the rookie very little room coming out of turn four earlier in the race, ultimately leading to Gragson making contact with Chastain. This led to Gragson cutting a tire just a few laps later and ruined any chances he had of finishing well, ultimately ending the day 29th while Chastain scored a top five finish.
After the race, an angry Gragson approached Chastain on pit road to confront him about the incident:
“You f*cking doored us and fenced us.”
Chastain responded:
“I thought I would clear you.”
Gragson then grabbed Chastain’s firesuit and shoved him, saying:
“You f*cking doored the f*ck out of us man. What the f*ck’s your f*cking problem dude?”
Chastain told Gragson to stop after he grabbed him, but after multiple warnings, Chastain landed a shot right square on Gragson’s jaw.
Obviously fans were fired up over it, and honestly it’s the kind of personality that NASCAR has been missing from its drivers for awhile.
But the question remained: Would NASCAR penalize the drivers for the scuffle?
According to Beyond The Flag, NASCAR Senior Vice President of Competition Elton Sawyer said yesterday morning on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio’s “The Morning Drive:”
“We’ve looked at that, we’ve talked about it and we’ll continue to have conversations with Ross and Noah. As we’ve said before, our sport is an emotional sport.
Our guys, again, using Sunday, everybody was on the edge, so when you felt like your day hasn’t gone the way you had hoped it would and someone may have impacted that in a way that you’re not happy, you’re gonna show your displeasure.
We’ll continue to have some dialogue with those two organizations to make sure we’re in a good place, but thought that Noah and Ross both … they got to a level there that, obviously, we would have preferred not to have seen, but they were both showing their displeasure of what happened, but again, it’s an emotional sport, and from time to time, you are going to have disagreements and you’re gonna see that.”
So, it sounds like the two won’t be facing any immediate penalties up to this point – which is honestly the right call here. NASCAR needs drivers who are passionate and draw attention to the sport from those who don’t necessarily tune into NASCAR every weekend.
And Chastain and Gragson created a ton of buzz for NASCAR: The two drivers combined for more Twitter engagements on Sunday than the next 23 drivers combined, including race winner Denny Hamlin.
NASCAR itself has also been promoting the hell out of the confrontation, sharing 4 tweets about the confrontation after the race.
There’s no doubt that Chastain and Gragson are drawing attention to NASCAR. And it makes sense that NASCAR wouldn’t want to do anything to discourage that by penalizing their most talked-about drivers for something that ultimately didn’t have any effect on the outcome of the race.
