Richard Petty & Bruton Smith comment on fines handed down by NASCAR.
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“You’ve got to defend yourself no matter what, but if he knew he was going to be fined $25,000, (you) might have let the guy take another swing at him,” Petty said Thursday.
Ambrose is paying the fine and not appealing, but Petty said he wants to talk to NASCAR about it, considering NASCAR has been pushing a “boys have at it” philosophy the last few years.
“No way he should have been fined,” Petty said following an appearance at Charlotte Motor Speedway. “The first thing they done is ‘Gentlemen have at it’ or whatever they called it. … What I seen on the TV was that he was trying to get away.
“The boy kept pushing and shoving and he was trying to get away and finally got cornered and had to come out of that. Is NASCAR saying, ‘OK just lay there and get the tar beat out of you, we won’t fine you, we’ll fine the other guy?’ I don’t know what their rationale was.”
“It used to go on a little bit all the time, but they didn’t have all of the TV cameras and all that stuff, so you could go around behind a truck and do what you needed to do and there wasn’t very many people who knew about it,” Petty said.
Petty, the sport's all-time winningest driver and an inaugural inductee into the NASCAR Hall of Fame, supports his driver.
“I always look at it as you have to defend yourself no matter what the circumstances are, and that’s what I saw in the Marcos situation,” Petty said.
“What provoked it? I have no idea. I don’t even think Marcos knows really what provoked the whole thing, but in the (grand) scheme of things if you can’t protect yourself, then NASCAR is not going to come and protect you, so he had to do what he had to do.”
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“I was thinking here earlier about paying his fine,” Smith said after the event at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
Smith said the fine wasn't necessary.
“I am not upset, but I certainly wish they hadn’t done that,” Smith said. “I was hoping that they would just not pay any attention to that. That’s a Saturday night and they said, ‘boys, have at it,’ and this is part of it.
“I think they should have ignored it. I wish they would re-think it right now and refund his money. It would be wonderful.”
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