Chase Briscoe Says NASCAR Turns Drivers Into Liars About Payback Wrecks - And the Penalty Reports Prove It
· Yahoo Sports
Chase Briscoe didn't wreck anybody to make his point this week. He just went on a podcast and said the thing every driver in the Cup Series garage already knows but almost nobody puts on the record: NASCAR's disciplinary process has a don't-ask-don't-tell problem, and it keeps turning the sport's biggest stars into bad actors every time a fresh wreck gets reviewed.
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The remarks came on the Rubbin' is Racing podcast, days after NASCAR closed the books on two separate Chicagoland Speedway incidents without issuing a single penalty. Briscoe's issue isn't that NASCAR lets drivers settle scores on the racetrack - he's fine with that part. His problem is what happens after the checkered flag, when a driver who obviously wrecked somebody on purpose has to stand in front of reporters and call it a racing incident, because that's the price of staying out of the penalty report. "Everybody knows you're lying about it," Briscoe said, describing the bind NASCAR's own process puts drivers in.
He's not wrong about the bind. He's also sitting on more supporting evidence than he probably realized, because NASCAR has spent this entire season demonstrating, in exhaustive public detail, what actually earns a driver a fine, and intent alone has never been enough.
The Standard NASCAR Says It Uses
Rewind to Texas Motor Speedway in early May, before any of the Chicagoland drama existed. Ryan Preece got frustrated with Ty Gibbs, announced his intentions over his own team radio, and turned Gibbs into the outside wall about half a lap later. NASCAR's response was swift and public: a $50,000 fine and a 25-point penalty, among the stiffest behavioral penalties handed out all year. NASCAR's vice president of racing communications walked through the reasoning himself: officials reviewed the team radio, the in-car video and the car's SMT telemetry data, and the combination of Preece stating his intentions and then following through on them was enough to cross into what the rulebook labels actions detrimental to stock car racing. RFK Racing appealed. The National Motorsports Appeals Panel upheld the penalty in late May, and Preece was left admitting it no longer mattered what he thought, the fine and the points were staying gone.
This wasn't Briscoe's first brush with NASCAR's points ledger this year either. His own speeding penalty back in March already put a dent in his playoff cushion, which makes his willingness to needle NASCAR's officiating now feel less like a driver picking a random fight and more like someone who has personally paid the price of the system he's describing.
What makes that Texas ruling useful context isn't the penalty itself. It's what happened at the same track, during the same race, to a different driver. Kyle Busch made contact with John Hunter Nemechek late in that Texas race, and NASCAR declined to penalize him at all. The explanation was just as specific as the one it gave for Preece: Busch's steering data showed him cranking the wheel hard to compensate for damage from an earlier incident, there was no radio audio of him announcing any intent to retaliate, and officials couldn't rule out that a genuinely damaged race car, not a vindictive driver, put him into Nemechek. Two contact incidents, one race weekend, two different rulings, and NASCAR was happy to explain exactly why. One driver told everyone what he was about to do and then did it. The other driver didn't.
That is, by NASCAR's own account, the actual test. Radio intent plus contact equals a penalty. Ambiguous data and no announced intent equals no penalty, even when a car ends up in the fence.
Chicagoland Didn't Get the Same Test
Which is what makes Briscoe's timing so pointed. Five weeks after the Preece ruling, NASCAR ran its first Chicagoland Cup date in seven years and handed out zero penalties for two incidents that looked, at minimum, adjacent to the standard the sanctioning body had just spent a podcast explaining.
Shane van Gisbergen put Austin Hill into the outer wall on Lap 48 of the eero 400, ending Hill's day and prompting Hill to sideswipe van Gisbergen right back under caution before heading for the garage. We already broke down that incident in detail, including the team radio where Richard Childress accused SVG of running a deliberate payback wreck tied to a crash two weeks earlier at the Naval Base Coronado street race. That's the detail worth sitting with here: a car owner used the word payback out loud, on a recorded radio channel, about a specific prior incident, functionally the same category of evidence NASCAR leaned on to fine Preece $50,000. NASCAR reviewed it anyway and ruled there wasn't enough to prove the contact crossed from hard racing into intentional retaliation.
A few pit boxes over, Carson Hocevar and Zane Smith wrecked each other on Lap 32 of that same race. We covered that one too, and it didn't draw a penalty either, despite a documented grudge dating back to an Iowa incident the year before and a needle already sharpened by a bracket-challenge matchup the week prior at Sonoma. Sonoma, for what it's worth, was also the site of van Gisbergen's own head-turning weekend a few weeks earlier, proof that this NASCAR season's collection of grudges rarely stays contained to a single track.
Neither Chicagoland ruling was necessarily wrong on its own facts. NASCAR's public explanations for both incidents leaned on the same the-data-doesn't-prove-intent logic it used to clear Busch. But stack all four rulings side by side across one season and Briscoe's complaint stops sounding like a driver venting and starts looking like a fair read of an inconsistent system. Preece got the full weight of the rulebook for saying something on the radio. A team owner used the same kind of language on the radio at Chicagoland, and nothing happened. If the standard really is radio evidence plus contact, NASCAR either has to apply it evenly or stop pretending the standard is the standard.
Why NASCAR Might Actually Prefer the Gray Area
There's a less cynical read of all this, and it's worth giving NASCAR its due: ambiguity is a deliberate tool here, not just sloppy officiating. Every time NASCAR officially rules a wreck intentional, it's making something closer to a legal finding than a competition call. Team owners insure their equipment, and a chassis destroyed in a crash classified as deliberate contact opens a very different conversation with an insurer, a sponsor and potentially an attorney than one filed away as a routine racing incident. Drivers also assume plenty of risk climbing into a stock car, but the legal doctrine covering assumption of risk in contact sports generally covers the ordinary hazards of the activity, not necessarily a competitor intentionally wrecking them at 180 mph. NASCAR has every incentive to keep as many incidents as possible inside the ordinary hard racing bucket, because every incident stamped intentional is a data point a plaintiff's attorney could use down the road.
That's precisely the tension Briscoe is describing, just from the other side of the microphone. NASCAR benefits from the vagueness. Drivers get stuck performing a version of events everybody in the room already knows isn't quite true, because the honest version carries financial and legal weight the sanctioning body would rather not assign every single week.
The Radio Culture NASCAR Built On Purpose
There's an irony in all of this that Briscoe didn't mention but is worth pointing out anyway: NASCAR sells access to those same team radios as part of its broadcast product. PRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio and the in-car scanner apps exist because raw, unfiltered driver frustration makes for good entertainment, and NASCAR has spent years marketing that access to fans. Then it turns around and uses that same audio as the deciding piece of evidence in a fine. Preece's radio outburst about Gibbs became the centerpiece of his own penalty. Every driver who's ever kept a live scanner feed running knows that lesson by now, which is exactly why Briscoe says the smarter move is to stay quiet on the radio and keep a straight face for the cameras afterward. The sport built an incentive structure that punishes honesty in the moment and rewards a good poker face after the fact.
What Comes Next
None of the four incidents at the center of this, Preece-Gibbs, Busch-Nemechek, Hill-van Gisbergen, Hocevar-Smith, is fully closed. NASCAR has scheduled meetings with both Chicagoland pairings ahead of this weekend's race at EchoPark Speedway, a step the sanctioning body typically takes when it wants to head off a rivalry before it produces a fifth incident nobody can rule on cleanly. Hill currently sits fifth in the Cup Series standings with a legitimate shot at the title, which means he has more to lose than most drivers from letting a grudge calcify into a pattern. Preece, meanwhile, is $50,000 and 25 points lighter with a denied appeal on the books, a permanent data point every future driver can point to the next time NASCAR tries to explain why somebody else got away with the same thing he didn't.
Briscoe's larger point survives all of that context, and it arguably gets stronger for it. He never argued NASCAR should crack down on every incidental bump between fenders. He argued that a sport built on drivers policing each other only works if the officiating around that self-policing is consistent enough for everyone to actually trust it, and that when it isn't, the sport ends up asking its biggest stars to lie to fans who already know better. NASCAR's own penalty reports this season have made an unintentional case for exactly what he's talking about.