Drawing and defining the line: Officials step in after last-lap overstep at Richmond

Most everyone -- fans, industry experts and pundits included -- has joined a chorus this week in asking where "the line" is and wondering whether Austin Dillon's last-lap actions Sunday at Richmond Raceway crossed it. If only the line were as simple and plain as a painted marker on a race track. The ruling issued Wednesday by NASCAR officials made it clearer what won't be tolerated. Dillon straddled the line that separates aggressive and boorish on-track behavior for three days before Wednesday's penalty report went live, and three days after he bulled his No. 3 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet through fellow contenders Joey Logano and Denny Hamlin to score his first Cup Series win in nearly two years. Elton Sawyer, NASCAR's senior VP of competition, indicated to reporters in the hours after Sunday's race that Dillon's actions had inched up to the line of what was acceptable. By Wednesday, after a thorough review of data, video and audio footage, Sawyer and the rest of the competition team determined Dillon's maneuvers overstepped the line of natural, hard-nosed racing. The checkered flag and trophy remained with Dillon and the No. 3 team, but gone were their eligibility for the Cup Series Playoffs and 25 points in the season-long standings. RELATED: Austin Dillon out of playoffs | Postseason picture shifts Hamlin was in prime position to add his fourth win of the year Sunday night, and his post-race remarks matched Logano's in spirit and in tone. In that three-day interim between the finish and the penalty, Hamlin offered a rhetorical example on his podcast on what could happen if Dillon's ploy was ultimately considered above board: If he reached the Championship 4, what would prevent him from intentionally crashing the other three title contenders to win the Cup Series crown? The overall discussion has spawned a series of hypothetical scenarios in its wake, but Sawyer says "the line" on those judgment calls is more defined than it was last weekend and that driver desperation has its limits. "I believe if you walk through that garage this weekend and you look at those guys, they know where the line is," Sawyer said. "I promise you, as a race-car driver, they know where the line is. They've done this a long time. It's been a few years since I did it, but I promise you, I knew where the line was. Hard NASCAR racing, a little bump, little tire mark, moving a guy up out of the groove to win a race, we've done that for years. What happened on Sunday night crossed the line, and it was the totality. Again, I use that word, but that's the way we looked at it." Sawyer wasn't referring to this year's solar eclipse, but Dillon's zone of totality included the full "body of work" of his tactics through Turns 3 and 4. Not one single aspect of the No. 3 driver's final-corner "Hail Mary" moves set off the alarm bells. All of it did. It was a lot to digest, and though Sawyer apologized for the delay in announcing the official decision, he also made it clear that the process was -- borrowing a baseball umpire's terminology here -- not a bang-bang call. Dillon delivered his own double-bang to clean out Logano and Hamlin at Richmond, and that prompted a comprehensive review and deliberation. "Ultimately we would like to, and we will get to a place where we're making this more 'on the spot,' if you will," Sawyer said. "Again, we want to make sure, the most important thing in these decisions is to get it right, and to make a split-second decision and it be wrong, that would be bad on our part." The only time in not-so-recent memory that an official reversal of the race's outcome occurred during the event because of rough driving came in 1991, when Ricky Rudd was penalized for bumping Davey Allison aside on the next-to-last lap at Sonoma Raceway. NASCAR officials had a full lap of Sonoma to mull it over, and Rudd was shown the black flag his next time by. The checkered flag instead waved over Allison. That long-ago ruling remains a polarizing anomaly to the normal cadence of late-race procedures -- crossing the line, to use the current framing. Sunday's finish was every bit as polarizing, but at least the "win at all costs" mindset now comes with a potential price.