NASCAR won’t dish out penalties for Ross Chastain-Noah Gragson fistfight at Kansas

The fight that set the racing world ablaze will go unpenalized.

NASCAR confirmed to The Charlotte Observer on Tuesday that the sanctioning body will not punish Ross Chastain or Noah Gragson for the headline-grabbing fight that transpired between the two drivers on pit road after Sunday’s Cup Series race at Kansas Speedway.

As Elton Sawyer, NASCAR’s vice president of competition, told SiriusXM NASCAR Radio on Tuesday morning: “We looked at that. We’ve talked about it. We’ll continue to have conversations with Ross and Noah.”

NASCAR made amendments to its rule book prior to the start of the 2023 season that gave itself the leeway to crack down on fistfights just like this one. What the new rule states: NASCAR can fine, suspend and/or revoke the membership for “member-to-member confrontations with physical violence.”

But Sawyer ultimately said no penalty was coming.

“When you feel like your day hasn’t gone the way that you had hoped it would, and someone had impacted that with a way you’re not happy with, you’re going to show your displeasure,” Sawyer continued on the radio. “So we’ll continue to have some dialogue with those two organizations and make sure we’re in a good place.”

The garage area will certainly take notice of NASCAR’s inaction. Gragson’s retaliation off-track drew no penalty — while previous attempts to retaliate on-track have led to severe penalties already this season. Just ask Denny Hamlin, one of Chastain’s original rivals who notched a $50,000 fine and a 25-point deduction earlier this year for an on-track incident with Chastain at Phoenix Raceway.

What happened between Chastain and Gragson?

The physical confrontation came after tension between Chastain and Gragson had been building for weeks.

It started in Talladega last month, when Gragson thought Chastain had made an unnecessary move that prompted contact and sent Gragson spinning into the wall. It was then followed up by Sunday’s run-in: Late in the race at Kansas, Chastain (driver of the No. 1 car for TrackHouse Racing) appeared to force Gragson (driver of the No. 42 for Legacy Motor Club) into the wall on Turn 4. Gragson responded by moving to the inside line and hitting Chastain in frustration shortly thereafter.

“We just got fenced by the 1,” Gragson told Fox after the race. “He took care of us at Talladega. We’re Chevrolet teammates, and he didn’t work with us there, fenced us here, and I’m just over it. Nobody else has the (nerve) to at lease confront him, or at least just grab him and do something. He’s just going to keep doing it, and I’m just over it.”

Gragson had shared a few words with Chastain after Talladega, he said. But he indicated that words might not be enough to get through to Chastain, who has angered pretty much everyone in the garage area in the past two seasons.

“I have respect for (TrackHouse Racing owner) Justin Marks and the rest of the TrackHouse team,” Gragson added, “and that’s why I’m not wrecking him on the racetrack. But I’m ready to fight him. I didn’t even get a shot in because the security guards got in the middle of it.

“But nobody confronts the guy, and he just keeps doing it, and I’m sick and tired of it.”

Chastain briefly spoke on the incident post-race, too.

“I got tight off of (Turn) 4 for sure, and Noah and I have a very similar attitude on the racetrack,” Chastain said. “We train together, we prepare together. We know each other’s every little bit about each other.

“So I definitely crowded him up off of 4. And he took a swipe at us in 3. And then he came and grabbed a hold of me. And a very big man once told me we have a no-push policy here at TrackHouse.”

How the fight came to be

The two Chevrolet teammates have reputations that precede them and made this sort of confrontation possible.

Gragson is a young and fearless Cup Series rookie. And Chastain is a slam-or-be-slammed driver who had an all-time breakthrough season in 2022 —one that ruffled a lot of veteran drivers’ feathers, that saw him go viral with a video-game-like move along the wall at Martinsville and that saw him finish second in the chase for the Cup championship. (Chastain has seen similar success and that reputation follow him into 2023. He was called a “wrecking ball” at Richmond and gets blamed for so much aggressive driving that the hashtag “#ThanksRoss” hasn’t stopped circulating on Twitter.)

TrackHouse Racing owner and one of Chastain’s most ardent supporters, Justin Marks, told SiriusXM NASCAR Radio on Monday that “he sort of knew that a moment like this was probably in the works for us at TrackHouse.”

“I’ve spent the last 24 hours thinking about it and thinking back to when I was a fan watching races, and thinking about some of these aggressive young drivers who have come up,” Marks said. “A lot of them have gone through the same process. Brad (Keselowski) went through it. Carl (Edwards) went through it. Tony. These guys show up, and they’re fast, they’re aggressive, and they go through this process of getting to a place where they can put a long career together.

“Those guys figured it out, and Ross will figure it out, and Sunday was just one of those moments where it all came to a head.”

Chastain put together a P5 finish on Sunday and sits as the points leader in the NASCAR Cup Series regular season standings. Gragson finished 29th at Kansas and is 32nd in the points standings.