NASCAR Cup points updated after Austin Cindric COTA penalty

Austin Cindric‘s COTA penalty from NASCAR has led to a big change in the Cup points standings. NASCAR took 50 driver points away from Cindric, meaning he has dropped from 11th place to 34th. The updated Cup points standings are below.

During the COTA race, Cindric hooked Ty Dillon. Along with losing 50 driver points, Cindric was fined $50,000. The good news is that NASCAR didn’t suspend Cindric, but he has a lot of work to do to move up in the standings.

Updated NASCAR Cup points standings

Rank	Driver	Points	Leader
1	William Byron	116	0
2	Ryan Blaney	114	-2
3	Tyler Reddick	111	-5
4	Christopher Bell	95	-21
5	Chase Elliott	95	-21
6	Bubba Wallace	94	-22
7	Alex Bowman	87	-29
8	Michael McDowell	85	-31
9	Kyle Busch	81	-35
10	Ricky Stenhouse Jr.	80	-36
11	Chris Buescher	77	-39
12	Joey Logano	77	-39
13	John Hunter Nemechek	76	-40
14	Carson Hocevar	72	-44
15	Kyle Larson	71	-45
16	Denny Hamlin	67	-49
17	Shane van Gisbergen	63	-53
18	Todd Gilliland	63	-53
19	Ross Chastain	62	-54
20	Riley Herbst	60	-56
21	Erik Jones	56	-60
22	Justin Haley	52	-64
23	Ty Dillon	48	-68
24	AJ Allmendinger	43	-73
25	Brad Keselowski	43	-73
26	Noah Gragson	42	-72
27	Austin Dillon	41	-75
28	Daniel Suarez	38	-78
29	Ryan Preece	38	-78
30	Zane Smith	35	-81

After the penalty was announced, NASCAR’s managing director of racing communications, Mike Forde, explained why Austin Cindric was not suspended. The reason we landed on a points and fine – we take every situation, every violation as its own unique incident, and I know probably fans don’t love hearing that sentence, and it’s said a lot,” Forde said on the Hauler Talk podcast. “But it’s said because it has to be said. It’s said because it’s true. Sure, we do look at past instances to help inform us, educate ourselves on how we should handle each subsequent one.

“But each incident is very different. Maybe not very different, but each is at least a little bit different and often times very different. In this case, we did feel it was significantly different than the previous two.”