NASCAR Stripped Denny Hamlin of His Pocono Win
American racing driver, Denny Hamlin is no longer the winner of the M&M’s Fan Appreciation 400 but that’s not all.
He is no longer the season’s second three-time winner, no longer the lone all-time Pocono Raceway champion with seven wins and no longer tied with Tony Stewart for 15th on the all-time wins list at 49.
Instead, the future NASCAR Hall of Famer now owns a page of the stock car racing history book that no driver wants to write.
His win was disqualified. Wiped out. Deleted. It’s not merely the first time that a racer at NASCAR’s top level has had a victory taken away via postrace technical inspection during the sport’s so-called modern era that began in 1972.
This is the first time that it has happened since 1960. It feels like we’d better get used to it. Joe Gibbs Racing seemed to admit as much when it let the appeal deadline come and go without putting up a fight.
NASCAR has always threatened to do this. It has promised one day it would happen. Beginning in 2019, facing criticism that it never did enough to punish those who used an illegal advantage to win a race – points and monetary fines but the win still stood – the sanctioning body pledged to do more, and it did, but at the lower levels, never in Cup. Until now.
Why now? Because now we have the still-new Next Gen car, the ride upon which NASCAR has gone all-in as the chariot that will drive the sport into a better future.
A one-size-fits-all parity creator that is essentially delivered to teams in a box, purchased from approved vendors only. These 2022 Chevys, Fords and Toyotas are the result of years of research, tens of millions of dollars of investment and unprecedented cooperation between those three warring corporate car giants.
That car has delivered a ridiculously competitive season, with 14 winners in 21 weeks, spread out across so many drivers and teams that there have been five first-time winners and there is a very real chance that a race winner could be left out of the 16-team postseason this fall.
All of the above is why NASCAR told teams not to mess with the Next Gen. NASCAR warned there would be dire consequences if they did. But NASCAR had also said that before. A lot.
Yet, in nearly 75 seasons of NASCAR Strictly Stock/Grand National/Cup Series racing, even those of us who fancy ourselves stock car racing historians were sent scrambling to find disqualifications of race days gone by.
This article was originally published by Ryan McGee on ESPN
