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For the second time in two years, Motorsport Australia has handed down a formal reprimand regarding physical contact at a Supercars event.
Two years ago, it was Barry Ryan that was slapped on the wrist after a light shove on Mark Winterbottom in the moments after Winterbottom had tipped then-Erebus driver Will Brown into a nasty shunt.
You can comfortably predict that without one, we wouldn’t have the other. And the vastly different handling of two situations that are by no means identical, but well and truly similar enough, is where this gets tricky for both series and administrator.
This time around, the issue wasn’t seen as a problem worth investigating by Motorsport Australia. Race control saw it on TV as did everybody else. But showed no interest in taking it further, particularly given Tickford CEO’s Simon Brookhouse had played it down in the post-race press conference.
It wasn’t until Tickford eventually did decide to request an investigation, apparently one that went straight to MA CEO Sunil Vohra, that the ball started rolling.
And once it did, the outcome was a forgone conclusion. If Ryan was reprimanded, the same had to happen to Dutton.
To summarise, we’re in a situation where the governing body, and one would assume also the series, saw no issue with something… but once it was investigated everyone knew it would be punished. From zero to 100 in one request.
It’s awkward and a bad look for Supercars and Motorsport Australia.
The awkwardness is that we’re in the situation where physical contact seemingly has to be punished. And the blame for that can be traced back to the referral of the Ryan/Winterbottom stoush to the stewards by Supercars race director James Taylor back in 2022.
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That set a precedent that, when coupled with Supercars’ own incredibly inflexible rule (“a person must not intentionally make physical contact with another person except in self-defence”), makes these incidents impossible to ignore – even if race control tries its best to, as was the case in Tasmania.
My personal opinion has always been that Ryan shouldn’t have been reprimanded two years ago. And the same goes for Dutton this time around.
If we’re trying to build up a gladiatorial image for these race car drivers, pretending the most minor of shoves poses some sort of danger is ridiculous.
And in both cases, the shoves weren’t provocation. It’s very different if it’s the push-and-shove that comes right before a punch-on, but that’s not what we’re talking about.
The fact is, this sort of physical contact is so far removed from endangering people. If two people have each other collars in their hands, that’s when the reprimands should be coming out. As a final warning before people take it too far.
But these incidents are miles and miles from a full-blown fight. And we are not even in the territory of setting a bad example. Nobody could realistically watch the Randle/Dutton incident and take it as a green light to belt someone at a club meeting the following weekend.
There is also an element of self-policing to all this. Dutton pushing back a bloke trying to apologise rightly copped flack on social media. That should be punishment enough.
We want personalities. We want action. We need it. We’re in the lead-up to the Bathurst 1000 and we’re about to watch Greg Murphy poking Marcos Ambrose in the chest over and over and over again. The sport uses these moments to promote itself. And then punishes people for creating the moments in the first place.
The path we are on is that teams will tell drivers never to approach a competitor or a rival garage. Just leave it be and flick the driver a text to either demand an explanation or apologise later. The risk of sanction for acting on your emotions is too high.
And all of these incredible moments of drama and conflict, the very stuff professional sport is built on, will be lost.
For the good of the future of the sport we need to accept that you can have conflict, even if it involves physical contact, without it being a problem.
Motorsport Australia needs to find a way to squeeze the toothpaste of these past reprimands back into the tube, and Supercars needs to re-word its restrictive rule.
Randle approaching T8 and Dutton intervening was a brilliant moment of sport and drama and theatre. And if we want more of it, we need change. Because nobody is the winner out of these slap-on-the-wrist reprimands.
