the data proof of what he did

After multiple days of deliberation and analysis, NASCAR issued a precedent-setting decision to penalize Austin Dillon for the controversial moves leading to his Richmond win. Dillon gets to keep the victory—trophy, money, and everything—but his automatic playoff berth has been revoked. Plus, both Dillon and the Richard Childress Racing team have been docked 25 points. NASCAR’s decision—one that , in some ways, sits at the existential crux of the Cup series choices to be a “racing series or a wrecking series“—was reached based on deeply parsing data, footage, and rules to arrive at a weighty decision. Data that shows not only Dillon’s actions, but his intent.

An immense amount of video footage and opinions emerged after the race finish on Sunday, but in order to fully understand what happened, NASCAR needed to see the SportsMedia Technology (SMT) data stream. SMT data is an array of telemetry captured from the cars showing info like steering angle and throttle percentage, along with a handful of other variables. It’s available internally to NASCAR competitors (but not the public, and was shared with me by a source). Which means we can analyze the same data that NASCAR officials looked at for Dillon’s last two laps, including that crash-filled final run to the finish line.

In the SMT footage, Dillon’s lap 407 is shown in orange, while lap 408—the race’s final lap—is shown in blue. Immediately you see that Dillon followed the bottom of the track on lap 407, but ended up in the middle of the track on that last lap.

In this first image we can see the moment of impact where Dillon hits Joey Logano and sends him spinning. Notice immediately that Dillon is higher up on track than he was on the ghost image of his previous lap, along with utilizing more throttle at 21% versus the previous lap at 11%. This indicates that Dillon was likely more focused on driving into the back of Logano’s car than actually attempting to make the corner. If he had not been able to hit Logano, his momentum would have likely sent him up the track and resulted in him failing to make the corner.

In the video above, crew chiefs Todd Gordon and Travis Peterson analyze these moves, employing overhead footage to show the yaw angle difference of the two cars and are able to see exactly where Dillon was pointed up the track while Logano was attempting to make the corner.

As Dillon sends Logano spinning into the wall, Denny Hamlin…