Fighting for P1 at the Cook Out 400, Austin Dillon may have had his due reasons for that double tap to Joey Logano & Denny Hamlin in overtime. But it was quite baffling how Ricky Stenhouse Jr & Ryan Preece got together to send the race past its scheduled distance, with only two laps to go. Especially, considering those two were fighting for nothing but real estate at Richmond, mere moments away from being lapped by the leader.

Over 200 points separate Preece & Stenhouse from the playoff cutline. But as things stand, neither has had the type of season that even remotely warrants them a hypothetical playoff run. For starters, Stenhouse Jr’s major claim to fame in 2024 was a right hook to Dillon’s teammate Kyle Busch at North Wilkesboro. As for Preece? With only one top-5 finish to show for amid a dismal season, he is the only driver still scrambling for a permanent home at Tony Stewart & Gene Haas’s soon-t0-close race team. These facts have led the grandstands to shade the duo heavily, for altering a race that could have avoided all its ensuing controversy.

Ricky Stenhouse Jr and Ryan Preece cause chaos at Richmond

The #47 car and #41 car have ended their races on a DNF eight total times this season. Ricky Stenhouse Jr is to blame for five from that disappointing cumulative. Although Preece has gone home early only three times in his dismal advances, the duo have often found themselves on the butt end of many defamatory headlines. Preece, the overlooked Stewart-Haas driver, has languished towards the bottom half of the points table without a win for nearly four full-time Cup seasons at two organizations. Stenhouse Jr has done a little better than Preece in that regard, scoring himself three wins in NASCAR’s premier tier, with the most recent coming at the 2023 Daytona 500 season opener.

Winning the Great American Race puts a lot of eyes on a full-time Cup Series driver. But before Stenhouse Jr. became famous for his Daytona 500 win, most fans knew him as “Wrecky Spinhouse.” He gets this nickname because he crashes his car and damages a lot of equipment. At what point in time the JTG Daugherty driver found himself attached to this moniker is still unclear, but the man responsible for turning it into a household gimmick was ironically Kyle Busch. Rowdy has found himself on the receiving end of a Stenhouse Jr crash-train often. And after their All-Star scuffle in North Wilkesboro, Busch doubled down on his ill feelings toward his 36-year-old aggressor. He even compared Ricky’s dismal performances overall to his equally disappointing 2024 run, saying, “I suck just as bad as you,” following their dust-up.

Looking back at things, it is quite ironic that a former two-time Cup champ now finds himself in the same situation as the man that he and many others have ridiculed openly in the past for reckless driving. It is even more so, considering Richard Childress Racing, the team Kyle Busch drives for, won their first race in 2024, courtesy of a reckless finish by their #3 driver, Austin Dillon.

But nothing’s truly fair in love, war, and NASCAR. So after they added eight extra laps to the originally scheduled Cook Out 400, many fans were raging at how that “abomination of a finish even had a chance to happen,” thanks to Ricky Stenhouse Jr and Ryan Preece bringing out that all-important caution. Chasing shadows at the back of the pack, Ricky Stenhouse Jr lived up to his distasteful nickname, as his #47 got into the #41 of Preece aimlessly, and into turn 1, in front of P1-running Austin Dillon, who was probably aiming to break an 86-race winless streak on speed and not controversy.

Alas, that wouldn’t be possible, as the race called for its first incidental yellow following this event. And when the chequered finally dropped on Lap 408 after the final restart, Dillon had sent two cars out of contention to earn his fifth career Cup win, with Preece recovering to secure himself a P25 finish. Karma seemed to hit Stenhouse Jr the hardest as he ended his race early behind the wall after contact with the #41, whilst his most famous critic, Kyle Busch, didn’t make any notable moves at Richmond to finish exactly where he started in the twelfth position.

Without the drivers adding their distinct flavor to the Cook Out 400, it was turning out to be quite the straightforward affair on Richmond’s 0.75-mile surface this past Sunday. If not for the first incidental caution, the biggest point of contention would have probably been the pit road incident between Christopher Bell and Erik Jones in Stage 1. Austin Dillon and Richard Childress would not have to be justifying their questionable in-car radio dialogue. And Joey Logano could have saved himself the displeasure with a straightforward P3 finish behind Denny Hamlin, who was at least a second ahead of the #22 car at the time of caution.

But that course of action received its unexpected alterations. Ricky Stenhouse Jr and Ryan Preece are now in the crosshairs of the NASCAR audiences. As one fan wrote in a thread that has gained a lot of traction recently on the NASCAR Subreddit, “Lost in all of the chaos last night regarding the finish is that Ricky Stenhouse and Ryan Preece wrecked each other while not even racing for position and with no one close to them.”

Fans furious as ‘Wrecky Spinhouse’ strikes again

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Reddit user u/GarageBirdie’s initial post explains that their notice of the catalytic issue “doesn’t excuse what Dillon did at all,” instead they assert, “It is a bit ridiculous that the abomination of a finish even had a chance to happen.” The original post and its sentiment are not wrong at all, considering even Steve Letarte had assumed in the broadcast booth that “if Dillon gets to [Logano], there will be contact.” The stakes of the whole situation were way too high to bring forth a clean finish, anyway.

Concurring with the thread, other NASCAR faithful shared their own opinions, replying with things like, “I agree but I don’t know why any of this is Preece’s fault. Stenhouse just overdrove it into the turn for some unknown reason.” One fan refused to pin all the blame on Stenhouse as they wrote, “He did, but Preece came down too. I honestly don’t think he expected Ricky to be there, but regardless, they wrecked.”

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But a majority of the grandstands saw a very contrasting picture. “I would be more surprised if they didn’t wreck each other,” opined a member of the NASCAR community. However, the second most common sentiment was that targeting Ricky Stenhouse Jr, or ‘Wrecky Spinhouse’ rather, like this reply that read, “Ricky did Ricky things. He can get mad at his nickname, but when in doubt ‘Wrecky Spinhouse’ will happen.”

But Preece had his separate naysayers who did not hesitate from making nasty conclusions about the whole incident with comments such as this one shading his own cautionary advances in 2024: “Runs just well enough to stay in the sport, but not well enough to attract a bunch of attention and blow his cover.” Sad but true, that has indeed been the reality for Ryan Preece in 2024, the last standing hope of Tony Stewart’s once-glorious Stewart-Haas quartet. As for Ricky Stenhouse Jr? The man must do a lot better to dispel his “wreck it-Ricky” narrative.