Denny Hamlin’s Tough Break Explained

Most of the time in NASCAR, when a team incurs a penalty, it’s a direct result of action taken on the part of said team.

That is not the case in Denny Hamlin’s most recent penalty from NASCAR that was handed down on Thursday afternoon. Instead, Hamlin and Joe Gibbs Racing are in a world of trouble for something they had no hand in.

Before Hamlin’s win at Bristol Motor Speedway, Toyota Racing Development (TRD), the performance works team that handles the building of all Toyota-signed teams, rebuilt his engine. This is nothing new, as engines will get torn down and rebuilt throughout the course of any NASCAR season due to the immense wear and tear that these engines go through during a race weekend.

The problem, though, came when Toyota failed to let NASCAR inspect the engine. Such inspections are essentially necessary when a team wants to even breathe in the direction of any of the engines in the cars. NASCAR has to inspect the engines if teams want to rebuild them, decommission them or even if they want to move them to another car.

NASCAR checks the legitimacy of these inspections via a seal along the main block of the engine, and if that seal is broken or even appears to have been altered, an automatic L-2 penalty is to be assigned, per the NASCAR rule book. In this case, that was the loss of 75 driver’s championship points, 10 playoff points and a fine of $100,000 to Hamlin’s crew chief.

While these are the lowest levels of L-2 penalties that NASCAR can assign, it’s still no small thump to Hamlin’s playoff hopes, especially this late in the season. If someone were to make the argument that “Well, he did cheat,” that would still be permissible though, right?

In most cases, that someone would be exactly right. However, in this instance, Hamlin and JGR were completely in the dark on the issue. They didn’t even report it – TRD did. That’s right. The group that made the screw up self-reported the issue before NASCAR could dive into it, and an L-2 penalty was still assessed this late in the season.

What’s more, though, is that this isn’t a penalty that’s from a race that was just a mere couple of weeks ago. It’s been months since Hamlin’s win at Bristol, and this penalty has decided to rear its ugly head at the worst possible time for the 23XI Racing team owner and JGR driver.

To gauge just how much these penalties could hamper Hamlin, the numbers have to tell the story. Hamlin is…