On Wednesday afternoon, NASCAR finally handed out the expected penalties stemming from the chaotic finish to Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series Cook Out 400 at Richmond Raceway. In the end, the sanctioning body chose to let Austin Dillon retain his fifth career win, but NASCAR removed the driver and his team from the driver and owner playoff spots that came with the win.

NASCAR Vice President of Competition Elton Sawyer addressed the ruling with the media in a Zoom call Wednesday afternoon, apologizing to fans for how long it took the sanctioning body to reach a decision, but the 64-year-old said NASCAR ultimately wanted to make the right decision on the matter rather than making a quick call.

“Obviously the magnitude of this decision was and is huge so we felt it was very important that we get this right,” Sawyer explained. “From Sunday night, collecting all the data. Working again on Monday, all day yesterday. Looking at all the SMT data, looking at cameras in the car, obviously, the sound. Collecting all these facts, the meetings that we I completely understand our fans and the hold, I want to apologize to them for taking as long as it did. So I’m talking to them now make this decision.”

Sawyer went on to say that NASCAR has expedited the process of announcing penalties in the future.

“Yeah, I think ultimately we’d like to, and we’ll get to a place where we’re doing this more locally if you will,” Sawyer said. “Again, we wanted to make sure that the most important thing in these decisions is to get it right. And to make a split-second decision and it’s wrong, that would be bad on our part. The stewards of the sport, the time it took, and in this case, getting it right versus being quick on the decision We’re looking hard at how we could have done this in a much faster way.”

According to Sawyer, it wasn’t a rare action by Dillon on the last lap at Richmond that led to the NASCAR sanctions, the race VP says it was the confluence of all the moves Dillon made from the entrance to Turn 3 where he spun Joey Logano, to the exit of the turn 4 where he right-rear hooked Denny Hamlin, to the starting finish line, where Dillon ultimately won the race.

“If you take the total type of work, if you will, from turn 3 the contact with the 3rd and the 22nd, and as it progressed all the way through (turns) 3 and 4, and the contact with the 3rd and the 11 all the way through the start-finish line, we took all that in when we looked at it,” Sawyer said.

Ultimately, the ruling was made as NASCAR did in an effort to protect the series championship as well as the legitimacy of each weekend’s finish going forward.

“Most importantly, we want to make sure we protect the integrity of our playoff game and our championship when we come to Phoenix. We want to make sure our competitors understand that we want them to make all the decisions. We want them to be able to compete hard That’s what our sport has been about for more than 75 years, but we also want them to understand, and I think every one of them understands, that this crossed the line.

While NASCAR’s penalty report sent a strong message to competitors in the sport about what will and will not be acceptable in the battles for the NASCAR Cup Series win, many wondered why NASCAR didn’t strip Dillon of the win altogether. Sawyer says that while NASCAR will look at adding a provision to the rulebook regarding taking away race wins, there was simply nothing in the rulebook that allowed them to take away the race win.

“At the moment, we did,” Sawyer said when asked if NASCAR was considering stripping Dillon’s win. “When we looked through the rulebook, there’s not, at the moment, there’s not really a mechanism in the rulebook that gives us that option. It’s something we can look at in the future. But just based on our rulebook, which we used to guide ourselves in this decision, that’s how we got to where we did.”

The second urgent question was; why wasn’t Dillon suspended for an intentional right-rear hook on Hamlin? Other drivers, including the sport’s most popular driver Chase Elliott, and Bubba Wallace have been suspended for similar situations in recent seasons. Sawyer says every situation is a different set of circumstances.

“We looked at the situations with Bubba and Chase, and they were incidents on mile-and-a-half racetracks at 160 miles per hour, not to say that Richmond is one you wouldn’t consider (for suspension) at that kind of move , but every single situation is different,” Sawyer explained.

At the end of the day, Sawyer wants to make it clear that what Dillon did in pursuit of a desperation hail mary win at Richmond will not be tolerated, but he also wants to be clear that NASCAR does not want to discourage drivers from participating in traditional hard-nosed NASCAR full – contact racing.

“…like I said before, we encourage it. We want our race car drivers to go out there and race hard and contact, like I said Sunday night, that’s been our DNA for over 75 years,” Sawyer said. “But what happened Sunday night, in NASCAR’s opinion, and again, looking at all the data and analyzing it and talking about it, it crossed a line. That’s not the kind of racing, that’s not the way we want our races should stop. That’s not how we want to decide a champion, that’s not how we want to decide an event.”