Austin Cindric, Ross Chastain trying to move on after taking their lumps

Bob Pockrass

FOX Motorsports Insider

AVONDALE, Ariz. — The best thing for Austin Cindric and Ross Chastain during their race weekend at Phoenix is that they didn’t make the news.

OK, it would have been better if they had strong finishes. But they just needed a clean race after a troublesome Circuit of the Americas race, and they got that, as Chastain finished 11th and Cindric finished 19th.

Those finishes could be frustrating. However, they probably won’t have the drama they had last week.

A week ago, Chastain made a bonsai move on the opening lap, running into Chase Elliott in the process and several cars suffered damage. Certainly, it’s not a driver’s goal to make friends, but making a bad move early in a race doesn’t help earn trust from other drivers.

Cindric intentionally right-rear hooked Ty Dillon, which didn’t result in any penalty during the race, but NASCAR docked him 50 points and fined him $50,000 for the move.

For both drivers, the path to earning back respect and trust — while trying to tune out the noise — started with Phoenix.

And by that, it started with them uncomfortably trying to explain themselves in media sessions on Saturday. Cindric’s penalty put him below NASCAR’s top-25 media availability requirement threshold. But he came to the weekend media bullpen session, likely knowing that answering the questions could help him focus on the remainder of the weekend.

“I got forced into the runoff, forced off track, and just handled myself poorly in the face of adversity,” Cindric said. “I obviously got penalized for it. … I’ve been faced with a lot of adversity to start the season and a lot of emotions and obviously handled them poorly.

“And I would think that, given that situation again, I’d handle myself better.”

While the drivers owned up to their errors, words are cheap. They have to prove it on the track.

The Cindric penalty certainly created more chatter during the week, as NASCAR opted not to suspend him. The league cited that it was done at a lower speed than some other right-rear hooks that previously resulted in suspensions. NASCAR also felt that, because Dillon could continue and didn’t seem to have extensive damage, that a suspension — which now includes the forfeiting of all playoff points during the entire regular season — would be too harsh a penalty for the crime.

Cindric said it isn’t up to him to decide what his penalty should be, and drivers learn and adjust their actions to the penalties they see issued.

“As competitors, you absorb each case and learn from it or in my case, learn from my own personal experience,” Cindric said.

Dillon said he expected a one-race suspension for Cindric.

“Where maybe NASCAR gets itself in a little bit of trouble is when you try to play gray areas. What’s fast enough?” Dillon said. “For the past eight years of my career, they do a safety meeting in Daytona, and they show us a picture of a car sitting dead sideways that gets hit by one that’s going 75 to 100 miles per hour and the amount of damage that does is pretty incredible.

“Luckily, nobody was near the back, I guess, and nobody was coming and couldn’t see me and hit me while I’m dead stopped parallel to the front stretch. Would that have been enough to get a penalty?”

Others agreed, including veterans Denny Hamlin and Kyle Busch.

“Put it in the rulebook. A right hook will result in a one-race suspension. Period,” Busch said.

Busch added that “intent is intent” and dismissed the penalty as being more severe because of the playoff points implications as any reason to look at it differently.

“You should know that going in, right?” Busch said. “You want to pull that move, you’re going to know that [is the penalty] going in.”

As far as what drivers should know, the same thing could be said about Chastain and that the move he made at the start of the race at COTA would not work. He was going so fast in the inside lane, and he wasn’t going to make the turn.

“I’m the furthest left, and I’m the fastest so it was an error,” Chastain said. “When I went inside the [No.] 5 [of Kyle Larson], I thought we were slow enough from the [breaking] zone, and that was not the case.

“I’ve got to take that and I get to live with that. Yeah, from the outside, it doesn’t look good. It was a big error to go bottom of five [wide]. That was not necessary.”

The biggest criticism of Chastain was that risking that on the first lap seemed unnecessary and that the risk was not worth the possible reward on the initial lap of a road-course race.

“With risk, there’s always reward,” Chastain said. “That move was a bad move. I just don’t know how else to say it.

“In the moment. I felt in control until I got to the last third of the break zone, and then I started locking the rear and not being able to be as slow as I wanted to. … With any risk, there’s reward on the track, but obviously that would cost me more than it was worth.”

Hamlin said Chastain almost made the move work and every driver has to make those decisions on when to pounce.

“Ross started right in front of me, and somehow got to the third-place car,” Hamlin said. “I was 11th, so he went in there with commitment, for sure. … Had he honestly not caught in the door of the [No.] 9 [of Elliott], he probably would have gained 10 spots.

“So he might have looked at it differently, that the juice was worth the squeeze if he would have got through.”

Chastain’s move shows how desperate drivers are for points. Cindric, with his penalty, sits 32nd in the standings.

And that’s still ahead of four full-time drivers — Brad Keselowski, Ty Gibbs, Cole Custer and Cody Ware. Those four drivers have been involved in their fair share of accidents this year.

They aren’t racing to potentially heal their reputations, but they certainly are facing adversity.

Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR and INDYCAR for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including over 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass.