MARTINSVILLE, Va. – NASCAR officials were solely focused on the question of whether to punish Christopher Bell for making a decision during the roughly 25 minutes it took them to make a decision on the final lap of Sunday’s elimination race at Martinsville Speedway hit the wall.

NASCAR ultimately penalized Bell for what it called a safety violation, dropping him from 18th to 22nd after the race. Bell, who finished a lap behind the leaders, was dropped to the last car among those a lap behind. This allowed William Byron to secure the final spot in next weekend’s championship race at Phoenix Raceway, along with Joey Logano, Tyler Reddick and Martinsville winner Ryan Blaney.

Elton Sawyer, NASCAR’s senior vice president of competition, said officials, however, did not focus on the Chevrolet cars of Ross Chastain and Austin Dillon, which raced side-by-side behind the Chevrolet of Byron, who could not afford losing another position in the race final laps. Officials also didn’t address the question of whether Bubba Wallace’s Toyota slowed on the final lap, allowing Bell’s Toyota to get by and seemingly score the point it needed to advance.

“When you look at the other situations (Wallace) and the cars behind (Byron), it’s really irrelevant at this point,” Sawyer told reporters Sunday night. “We will look at these at a later date.

“But if you analyze exactly what happened, you look at the situation with (Bell) on the fence and then on the fence, which we made clear in our statement after Ross (Chastain) did that (in year 2022). that this would not be accepted.”

NASCAR announced on February 1, 2023 that it was banned the “Hail Melon” move Chastain made when he hit the wall in turns 3 and 4 on the final lap of the 2022 Martinsville playoff race. Chastain used the desperation move to gain five places and secure the final spot in the title race from Denny Hamlin.

NASCAR said at the time it wasn’t adding a rule, but pointed to a portion of the rulebook that covered it.

Section 10.5.2.5.A of the Cup Rules reads: “Safety is NASCAR and NEM’s top priority. Therefore, any violations that jeopardize the safety of an event or otherwise pose a dangerous risk to the safety of participants, officials, spectators or others will be treated with the utmost seriousness. Security violations will be punished on a case-by-case basis.”

Wallace slowed on the final lap and Bell passed Wallace in Turn 3. Bell drove up to the wall and rode along the SAFER barrier from the middle of the turn to Turn 4 before pulling away on the frontstretch.

After the race, Wallace told reporters, “I got loose or something broke and I was messing with it, and then (Bell) tried to push me away. “I say ‘bro.’ I’m just trying to wait for the right time and not crash, give a caution and mess up the whole field.”

Bell defended his actions of riding into the wall.

“My options are to slide into the wall or break out,” Bell told NBC Sports. “I can’t get away, so I slid against the wall.”

Of the time leading up to the results being announced, Sawyer said: “First and foremost, we want to get it right. This doesn’t happen every week. We want to be prepared.

“I thought our team in the tower did exactly what we needed to do. Let’s do this right.

“Luckily we don’t have it every week. We will certainly think again about whether we could have made this decision more quickly. I didn’t know it took – you could have told me it took five minutes or 55 minutes. I don’t know it.”

Chastain and Dillon also ran side by side behind Byron in the final laps

NBC played a post-race communication on Dillon’s radio.

“You know the deal?” Dillon asked.

“I’m trying to find them to tell them,” came the reply. “Justin (Alexander, crew chief), you tell the crew chief and I’ll tell…”

“…does (Chastain’s) crew chief know the deal?

“He should.”

NBC also played audio from Chastain’s radio in which spotter Brandon McReynolds told Chastain to be “nice and smart” to Byron because Byron was “a (point) for the good.”

Sawyer said NASCAR will review all matters.

“We’ll look at everything,” he said. “Like I said, we want to go back to how we would have done it anyway. We come back, we record all the data and videos. We listen to in-car audio. We will do all of this as we would at any event.

Asked about possible penalties this week, Sawyer said: “Like I said, we’ll look at it.”