Dale Earnhardt Jr. rips NASCAR over Carson Hocevar penalty: 'I'd like to sideswipe the sh*t out of some people'

NASCAR penalized Carson Hocevar for bumping Harrison Burton during a caution in the Ally 400 at Nashville on Sunday, but only after the race had settled and the organization had a chance to review the footage.

There were no immediate penalties applied, with the penalties instead handed down on Tuesday.

That fact has left many, including Dale Earnhardt Jr., wondering why NASCAR didn’t penalize Hocevar right away. Moreover, the question is whether the punishment loses its sting if it takes two full days to apply it and doesn’t happen during the race.

“I wonder what’s OK under caution, because I’d like to sideswipe the s*** out of some people under caution,” Earnhardt Jr. said on the Dale Jr. Download podcast. “Is that OK? Am I going to get penalized for that?”

As if to underscore his point, Earnhardt Jr. expanded even further.

“If somebody pisses me off enough, man, I want to run up there and run into their left front,” he said. “That’s like the most sensitive part of the car and if you screw that up on a guy’s car he’s going to have a hard day. So I’d like to run into that left front tire and bend up his fender and all that stuff. Am I going to get in trouble?”

Earnhardt’s co-hosts on the podcast told him they thought NASCAR would definitely not be OK with that. Of course, that answer didn’t necessarily satisfy the former driver either.

There’s just too much ambiguity.

“What does that even mean?” Earnhardt Jr. said. “Are they just going to be upset a little bit or are they going to penalize me?

“They didn’t do anything in the moment. What was the problem there? Why didn’t they do something in the moment? If they’re such sticklers for this little issue, how come they didn’t react in the moment?”

Obviously NASCAR should be punishing drivers for intentional sideswipes of other drivers, and that much was evident based on Hocevar’s penalties: a $50,000 fine and a loss of 25 driver points.

Still, Earnhardt Jr. thinks NASCAR has the enforcement completely backwards.

“I would, if NASCAR doesn’t like it, if NASCAR wants to penalize someone who does this, I would prefer they do it in the moment because that’s when it stings,” he said. “For them to penalize someone mid-week, not in the throes of competition, it doesn’t have the same sting. It doesn’t send the same message.

“No one truly will remember, if you’re trying to set an example for others to follow, is everyone paying attention on a Wednesday when Hocevar gets a penalty? No. Does it resonate into the next event? Probably not. But if he’s penalized in the moment, right then and there and it’s in front of hundreds of thousands, millions of people on TV, all over social media, then Hocevar or him in this situation, I don’t want to pick on the guy too hard, it’s shaming and it’s impactful. But when it happens under the rug on a Wednesday, what are we doing?”