Bristol was the stage for Carson Hocevar and Ryan Blaney’s post-race brawl, which saw expletives exchanged and punches thrown without hesitation. Fans in attendance and at home loved it; the sport gained plenty of traction on social media, and veteran Mark Martin hopes that’s how NASCAR treats this whole fiasco. As a spectacle.

“I hope NASCAR doesn’t fine anyone for language or for actions. These drivers need to be able to work things out themselves without the crew guys getting in the middle of it. If the crew guys want to fight, they need to fight each other, but they need to stay out of the drivers trying to hash things out,” Martin said on Dirty Mo Overdrive.

When it comes to fines, Martin joins the vast majority of the NASCAR community in believing there’s no reason to punish drivers for venting their frustration in the heat of the moment. Hocevar and Blaney threw hands in the immediate aftermath of the race, and in most cases, NASCAR doesn’t hand out penalties for such incidents.

That said, Martin also feels the two should have been allowed to fight more fairly. The moment Blaney walked over to Hocevar, people from both Spire Motorsports and Team Penske, along with NASCAR security, surrounded the two drivers. After Hocevar landed two huge punches on Blaney’s face, the No. 12 driver couldn’t retaliate as team members pulled him away.

“I understand the team wanting to protect their driver. I know I’ve been in that situation before, and I had some great team members on my side ready to fight for me, but that’s not really what I think we all want to see,” Martin added, insisting that crew members should not get involved in driver brawls.

The NASCAR Hall of Famer also noted that what happened in Bristol was especially unfair to Blaney. Hocevar is 6’4”, while Blaney is 5’7”. Martin feels that someone like the No. 77 driver would have an advantage when it came to landing a punch on someone much shorter, and that’s where Blaney lost out. The Penske driver was then unable to retaliate as those around him restrained him.

“I do wish that people didn’t grab Ryan because it was a little bit of an unfair fight. Ryan didn’t get a chance to counter because he was grabbed and held, and the second time that Ryan got hit, somebody was holding him. So, that wasn’t really great,” Martin said.

Overall, though, Martin feels that the fallout trackside did wonders for NASCAR. The sport shared various clips of the incident across social media, generating millions of views. Frontstretch, whose director Michael Massie’s phone suffered minor damage during the chaos, reported that its clip of Hocevar punching Blaney and the ensuing chaos has surpassed millions of views.

At a time when NASCAR fans are calling for a more old-school and unfiltered feel to the sport, this happened under the lights at Bristol on a Saturday night. For many, it felt like the NASCAR they loved was back. It’s something veteran journalist Jordan Bianchi, who was also trackside and witnessed the entire ordeal, discussed on The Teardown podcast.

Bianchi went as far as saying that if NASCAR fined either driver for their language or the punches, it would be the worst decision the sport has made since it fined Dale Earnhardt Jr. for using the word “s***” during a post-race interview at Talladega back in 2004.

Blaney was simply furious with Hocevar, as one would expect from a championship contender who had just been wrecked, regardless of whose fault it was. The Team Penske driver had won Stage 2 and was dreaming of a win when his tussle with Hocevar for second place with 43 laps to go sent him spinning into the wall. He ultimately finished 33rd, dropping two spots to sixth in the standings.

That said, all is not lost for Blaney. With seven races to go, he remains in the fight for the championship. He is 52 points behind leader Kyle Larson, who finished second at Bristol. That is not an impossible gap to overcome, and as Martin said, Blaney is smart enough to know that getting caught up in another incident with Hocevar or anyone else could lead to trouble.