NASCAR official explains Nashville penalty decision after Ryan Preece punishment

A senior NASCAR official has opened up on the decision not to penalize Austin Dillon for wrecking Brad Keselowski on Sunday.

Dillon had blamed the RFK Racing star for a different wreck earlier in the race and, when the No. 3 car wrecked out the 2012 champion around 50 laps later, there was a good amount of radio and interview chatter from the No. 6 team claiming that the wreck was intentional.

NASCAR has decided, however, that Dillon and his team will not be sanctioned for the incident, and Senior Director of Racing Communications Amanda Ellis explained why on the Hauler Talk podcast this week.

The answer was essentially the opposite of the answer to 'why did Ryan Preece's appeal fail last week?', with no intent signalled by the No. 3 and the data showing that he was actually out of the gas at the time of the wreck, rather than accelerating into the RFK car.

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Why Austin Dillon wasn't penalized for Keselowski wreck

“When that incident occurred," Ellis explained, "you do kind of take notice what happened on the track. We actually have the ability ...

“Scott Miller pulled all the data from that incident, and we knew pretty quickly that Austin was out of the throttle and they both were at the time of the incident. They obviously tangled on the track, and then the incident happened, right? ... But we were able to tell pretty quickly that it wasn’t a situation where Austin was in the gas or anything related to that.

"To your point, TV also kind of made that judgment call that they didn't think it was on purpose event though they had a difference of opinion about the race. We think it was more of a racing incident in NASCAR's opinion.”

Dale Earnhardt Jr. had offered some defence of Dillon on the Prime Video broadcast at the time, claiming that while the Richard Childress Racing driver probably wasn't mad about the wreck, he didn't instigate it on purpose.

Speaking to Keselowski's spotter TJ Majors on his podcast this week, he doubled down on that, saying: “My opinion is that, did he try to wreck you on purpose? I don’t think he did. Did he give a s*** that you wrecked? No, but I don’t think, considering everything that they’ve had to go through the last couple of weeks, that they want to be out there wrecking people."