"That is the case there" - Denny Hamlin believes NASCAR prioritized Bell penalty over alleged race manipulation incident

Denny Hamlin recently shared his take on NASCAR deciding to penalize his teammate Christopher Bell which eliminated him from the playoffs. During the race at Martinsville, because of his wall-ride move, Bell was handed a safety penalty because of which William Byron made the Championship 4.

Importantly, the other story coming out of Martinsville has been that of alleged race manipulation by several Chevrolet drivers in favor of Byron.

On the latest episode of Actions Detrimental, Denny Hamlin spoke about events in the last Round of 8 race. Jared Allen, the co-host, asked Hamlin if he thought NASCAR chose to focus on the Bell incident to avoid focusing on the race manipulation incident, which would've possibly involved a more relatively nuanced discussion.

Hamlin replied,

"More than likely, yes. That is the case there. They wanted to try to rule on...'forget if there's any other outside curricular things that we need to take a look at, did the moves of the drivers manipulate the finish in any kind of way?' One thing about it is, Christopher Bell didn't gain anything through this. A car actually passed him through this wall-ride that he had off of turn four, but you could see it as, if you're them you're saying, 'Well it's also defending a position as well right?' A position that he potentially could have lost to the #23 had he passed him back.

"I think that yeah they were probably in that 27 minutes [after the race] thinking about 'let's just dive into what the drivers themselves did that are in question and then we'll deal with the rest later'" [6:00].

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Denny Hamlin wants to understand how NASCAR makes decisions such as the Christopher Bell penalty

Continuing their discussion on the Christopher Bell penalty, Allen asked Denny Hamlin if he found NASCAR taking close to half an hour to make that decision acceptable. The #11 driver said he had no problem with the time, as long as NASCAR gets it right.

He added that he'd love to be a "fly on the wall" to see which stakeholders are in conversations regarding such decisions. Hamlin elaborated:

"Is it simply everyone giving Elton Sawyer or Brad Moran or whoever the information like, 'Hey wait we got to get you the information, here's the video here's the audios.' Again, if we're just talking about the #20, you can see it right there. They replay the replay numerous times they didn't need any audio from that. So my question is what is going on? Who is up there talking to Elton? I don't know" [7:10].

The Joe Gibbs Racing driver said that he doesn't know which stakeholders are up there with Elton Sawyer making that decision. This was why, Hamlin said, such calls are often delayed, when they are important ones.

He speculated that the people making these decisions receive lots of "opinions," instead of having a streamlined process that doesn't allow itself to be influenced by any stakeholders.