Kevin Harvick talks head-hunting, the Austin Dillon fallout after Richmond

Whatever the fallout may be from NASCAR following the finish to the Cook Out 400 on Sunday, the continuing consequences for Austin Dillon could be far greater.

He’s going to be a wanted man on the track now.

“Austin addressed that today and he fully understands that these guys are going to be head-hunting, and that’s the type of scenario that you worry about the moment and you suffer the consequences later,” Kevin Harvick said on the Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour podcast.

“And you can’t worry about that in the moment. You just have to say, ‘OK, the most important thing right now is that I win this race and get my car in the playoffs for our company and for myself.’ I think as a racer you do a lot of things that you sometimes aren’t proud of and you go back and you do them again or not. So you have to make those decisions on the fly.”

Austin Dillon’s decision was to get aggressive because, had he raced straight up, he likely didn’t have the juice to get to the finish line in first. First went Joey Logano, then went Denny Hamlin, collected in spinning heaps as Dillon pushed his way past.

Harvick actually provided some defense of Dillon’s aggressive driving, noting he was way outside the playoff field going into the race.

“When you’re in a position that there are no consequences, you have to make that move that Austin did,” Harvick said. “But I think that that comes full-circle in the playoffs when those moments are, especially when you’re around the 22 and 11 and you see some of the other guys that didn’t like the move with their post-race interviews and things like that.

“Austin doesn’t care about that, and he can’t worry about that. But it is going to make it an extreme uphill battle for Austin to make any ground in the playoffs, because you just, you can’t go into the playoffs with enemies, and I think it’s going to be, it’ll be very difficult for Austin Dillon to make a lot of noise in the playoffs just because of the tone that this kind of set with everybody.”

The playoffs will be up in the air until NASCAR makes its ruling. There’s a chance Austin Dillon is stripped of his playoff berth for racing detrimental to the sport.

If he isn’t, he’ll still face all the consequences of drivers being wary of him or wanting to get a piece of him.

Harvick pointed out, though, that NASCAR’s hand might just be forced into delivering a heavy punishment. And if not, it might just be the drivers who attempt to deliver justice.

“The other thing it might do too, everybody sees that if this goes and there’s no repercussions from this during the week, everybody sees that and that intensity level is going to step up as to where those guys push those lines in order to make something happen,” Harvick said.