Austin Dillon’s Actions Defined Richmond

This past weekend, NASCAR finally returned from Summer Break.

Due to Sunday’s (Aug. 11) final day of the Summer Olympics, NBC Sports insisted upon a late afternoon/twilight race at Richmond Raceway. A 6 p.m. ET start for a Sunday race on a non-holiday weekend is far from ideal. What did fans get? A race that will be memorable for all the wrong reasons.

In all seriousness, had Ricky Stenhouse Jr. not gotten into Ryan Preece and created the final caution, Austin Dillon would’ve had his most impressive victory in the NASCAR Cup Series. Instead, we have the most ridiculous of his five career victories.

Dillon just didn’t get a very good final restart and Joey Logano got past him cleanly. Now, Dillon had gotten by him twice in the final 100 laps, so it was plausible that he could have gotten him back, but he lost too much ground. So, he tried a desperate move.

Jeff Burton stated upfront that there was a good chance for shenanigans if Dillon got back to Logano. However, Logano just got a better run off of turn 2 and had a couple of car lengths on Dillon. What happened in turn 3 appears to be that Dillon took his car into the turn harder than he ever had before.

The in-car camera seems to indicate that Dillon was braking, just not as hard as he normally would. That allowed him to get to Logano’s bumper. Do I think he just wanted to give him a bump-and-run? That’s what Dillon claimed in his press conference Sunday night.

Perhaps that’s actually true, but he was going too fast into the corner to do that. Hitting Logano at that speed was going to spin him out, no matter what.

The secondary hit on Hamlin was even more egregious. He hit Hamlin in the right rear for no other reason than to put him in the wall. That’s bush-league trash right there. It just shows me that Dillon has no regard for his fellow drivers if he thinks that’s a good idea. If this were anywhere else outside of NASCAR’s National Series, he’d be looking at a DQ and a suspension.

The most likely move that will get a penalty out of Sunday was what Logano did on pit road after the race when he gunned it in front of a group of people that included Johnny Morris, Whitney Dillon and Mariel Swan, among others. That was intolerable. You could see that live on the…