After multiple days of deliberation and analysis, NASCAR issued a precedent-setting decision to penalize Austin Dillon for the controversial moves leading to his Richmond win. Dillon gets to keep the victory—trophy, money, and everything—but his automatic playoff berth has been revoked. Plus, both Dillon and the Richard Childress Racing team have been docked 25 points. NASCAR's decision—one that , in some ways, sits at the existential crux of the Cup series choices to be a "racing series or a wrecking series"—was reached based on deeply parsing data, footage, and rules to arrive at a weighty decision. Data that shows not only Dillon's actions, but his intent.
An immense amount of video footage and opinions emerged after the race finish on Sunday, but in order to fully understand what happened, NASCAR needed to see the SportsMedia Technology (SMT) data stream. SMT data is an array of telemetry captured from the cars showing info like steering angle and throttle percentage, along with a handful of other variables. It's available internally to NASCAR competitors (but not the public, and was shared with me by a source). Which means we can analyze the same data that NASCAR officials looked at for Dillon's last two laps, including that crash-filled final run to the finish line.
