For the past few years NASCAR has had the “boys have at it” attitude where they have chosen to let the drivers sort out their disputes whether it be on or off the track.

That policy may be coming to an end after the on track events last weekend at the inaugural Cup Series race at World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway during the Enjoy Illinois 300. 

On June 7, 2022 NASCAR’s senior vice president of competition Scot Miller stated that they will be monitoring the situation involving Ross Chastain and any rivals – namely Denny Hamlin.  Officials noted that they will step in if the situation escalates.

Early in the race on Sunday, Chastain made contact with Denny Hamlin and Chase Elliott in separate events – something Chastain later apologized for during a FOX interview.

While both Elliott and Hamlin retaliated, Hamlin, continued to crowd and block Chastain including sending him into the grass on one occasion and event blocked Chastain and keeping Chastain from passing; risking Chastain not being able to make minimum speed and being knocked out of the race.

During the race, NASCAR officials sent Hamlin’s team enough is enough message to which FOX aired the radio response where Hamlin laughed and said “right”.

Scott Miller noted that the issue would be addressed during the weekend debrief and the drivers would be called to the NASCAR hauler for a discussion.

In a SiriusXM radio broadcast Scott Miller said, “I mean, certainly we don’t like to see things like that, but there’s a certain amount of … we kind of have to let them handle it on their own somewhat.  And what we saw, while we were annoyed by it, there was no real contact. Neither one. I mean, they tried to make life miserable for Ross, we all witnessed that. But at least we didn’t see a blatant take-out or anything like that. And it was obvious from Ross’ post-race comments that he’s made some mistakes out there and wants to make it right, but it’s kind of up to those guys to sort it out and how it moves forward from there.  We’ll obviously keep a close eye on them as we do in all these situations. Probably will, may have them in the trailer face to face to talk about it as we’ve done before. We have our debrief, actually just after this call of the race weekends. We do that on Tuesday mornings, and we’ll discuss that situation further and decide how we’re going to move forward with it.”

Miller added, “we haven’t spoken to any of the parties,” Miller said. “It’s usually better to kind of let things die down and speak to him before we hit the track again, rather than do it at the race track. We’ll do that if absolutely necessary, but in this situation where there was no sort of blatant take-out in retaliation, best to kind of let that calm down a bit, and then have a word with him later.”

This weekend the NASCAR Cup Series travels to Sonoma for some road racing.