Toyota Owners 400 – Motorsports Tribune

What a difference a week makes.

Literally seven days ago, Hendrick Motorsports was still reeling from the biggest single day penalty to any organization in NASCAR Cup Series history and it was Tyler Reddick of 23XI Racing who fended off William Byron to provide a glimmer of hope for the rest of the garage.

Due to the 100 championship and 10 playoff point penalty and the injury to Chase Elliott, all four Hendrick Motorsports drivers faced long odds to reach the Championship Race in November. And maybe, just maybe, the confiscated louvers would be something akin to a kryptonite on their otherwise spec Next Gen Camaros.

So much for that.

Despite finding Hendrick Motorsports guilty of all charges levied upon them by NASCAR, the national motorsports appeals panel lessened its consequences, dropping the points element of the penalty. And just like that, all three current full-time Hendrick driver were right back inside the top-10 of the standings.

As if that wasn’t enough of a reminder of the current status quo, Kyle Larson and William Byron effectively dominated the Toyota Owners 400 on Sunday at Richmond Raceway with Larson and Josh Berry finishing 1-2 in part due to Byron getting crashed out of the top-5 on the penultimate restart.

This remains a Hendrick Cars Dot Com kind of world until otherwise stated, and that statement might lie in how the rest of the garage responds to precedence established by the national appeals panel.

Because, think about it, if you’re the other manufacturers and organizations in that garage, and the newly established punishment for pushing the boundaries is just fines and suspensions — that’s very much worth the risk.

At the same time, the risk is that neither Hendrick nor NASCAR is entirely being transparent about what the breakdown in communication was that led to those specific louvers being on the hoods at Phoenix.

Enter Hendrick Motorsports vice chairman Jeff Gordon after Sunday’s race.

“I said this in Atlanta, it should have never even come to that,” Gordon said. “I don’t want to give too much information because I want to respect the process, but it’s also a little frustrating that nothing gets shared from what determines whether there’s points given back or whether there’s money not given back and crew chief suspensions.

“I just feel like there was enough there that it’s not clear-cut. It’s not just a black-and-white situation because there was enough…