Richmond, Va. – NASCAR handed down several serious penalties this week after the Southern 500, including one to winner Denny Hamlin that encumbered his victory and suspended his crew chief for two races. He also forfeited the five playoff points awarded to the winner, which could ultimately hurt him, but still gets credit for another career win.

Hamlin gets it – the blow softened by the fact that he was already qualified for the Cup Series playoffs from an earlier win this season – and said his crew chief Mike Wheeler inspected the rear suspension issue himself and saw it was illegal.

At Richmond Raceway on Friday ahead of the Federated Auto Parts 400, the No. 11 Toyota driver had the perfect response to anyone that calls his violation cheating, pointing to the difference between a legal and illegal car being fractions of inches nowadays.

“How many wins does Richard Petty have? 200? One of those was with a big block (engine), so does he really have 199? Listen, my advice to those who say this or that is all the old-school fans that have been watching NASCAR forever, your driver cheated at some point in their career and they got away with it. The difference is inches, not thousandths because they didn’t measure that stuff back then. “It’s just a tighter box that we live in today, and the engineers and the crew chiefs are so smart that they fight for that little bit because they know it can make the difference in the smallest of deficits on the race track. So I’m gonna tell my crew chief to keep fighting for every inch or square inch of that car to be the best.”

Hamlin is right. Teams are pushing their cars’ limits every week with the goal of getting as close to the edge as possible without falling off. It doesn’t always work out, but they do this because technology has enabled the cars to be so exceptionally competitive and equal with each other that the tiniest edge could be the difference between a win and a loss.

For Joey Logano, without a win at Richmond on Saturday, that difference is making the playoffs or not. He won the spring Richmond race, but after failing the post-race inspection, that win was encumbered. He hasn’t won since and doesn’t have enough points to qualify without a trip to Victory Lane this weekend.

Including a fiery argument from NBC broadcaster and former driver Jeff Burton, the NASCAR world has been debating this week if drivers should be fully disqualified and not get credit for the win, despite it being encumbered and the team losing all the benefits of it.

Hamlin said he’d be in favor of disqualifying drivers for these types of penalties – or at least open to a discussion about it. However, if NASCAR started taking wins away, he’d want that rule to be applied equally among drivers and in the playoffs along with the regular season.

Matt Kenseth also shared his thoughts on the penalties and their significance moving forward.