Elton Sawyer, NASCAR senior vice president of competition, said Tuesday morning that series officials will further examine Sam Mayer wrecking Jeb Burton after the checkered flag in last weekend’s Xfinity race at Martinsville Speedway.
“Having (that) type of incident after the checkered flag, it’s just not something we’re going to tolerate,” Sawyer said Tuesday morning on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. “We’ll get with our team today, discuss it and see what the next steps are.”
Any penalty could come later today.
“(Mayer) destroyed our car and wrecked us,” Burton said after the race. “Hopefully NASCAR does something because he literally right-reared me into the outside wall. I hate it for my guys to tear up a car.
“I race a lot of people out here with respect and I just want it back. He ran over me for no reason, so I gave it back to him and he threw a temper tantrum. I’d love to talk to him but there wouldn’t be much talking. … The way he acts, he’s a punk. I think everybody knows that.”
Mayer was upset with Burton for triggering a crash that collected Mayer the previous weekend at Talladega and also was upset with how Burton raced him Saturday night.
“It’s a principle thing,” Mayer said. “(Burton) is the worst person to race around in the entire garage. He has a reputation of being over his head every single week and this was a prime example of it. He just can’t take no for an answer.
“A (playoff driver) racing for something huge, moved him out of the way and went on and was faster than him in the end. As soon as he got back to me, he gave it me and tried to wreck me three corners in a row. Thank God I have enough car control where I can hold on to it and not wreck. He has no respect for someone racing for something that’s bigger than he is.”
As for the process NASCAR in determining what action to take, Sawyer told “The Morning Drive” on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio: “I’ll let our series director (in the Xfinity Series) Eric Peterson run point. He’ll talk to both driver, in this case Jeb and Sam, get their side of the story.
“We’ll go back and look at all the replay. We’ll look at the race as an entirety to see what unfolded early on and then we take all of that, we sit down and look at prior situations that are similar and we’ll make a decision on how we move forward.
“When things happen after the race and we start using vehicles to run into each other, that risdes to a different level and we’ll respond accordingly.”
