It was almost a story repeating itself. “NASCAR fans and pundits thought they’d seen another one.”Hail Melon” when Christopher Bell passed Bubba Wallace late on the third turn of the final lap of Sunday’s race at Martinsville and clipped the wall several times to finish 18th.^th place with enough points to advance to Championship 4. Bell’s move broke the points tiebreaker with William Byron, but his version of the Hail Melon was stopped by NASCAR 27 minutes after the white flag dropped.

“Two years ago we had the situation with Ross here,” Elton Sawyer, NASCAR senior vice president of competition, said in a press release sent to Newsweek. “We went to Phoenix. There was a lot of discussion with the drivers that it’s not a decision we want to make on the last lap. We were able to get through Phoenix and had a great race. championship that year.”

“In the off-season meeting with the industry, the meeting with our drivers and with a man, it was not a decision they wanted to have to make. There was language in the rulebook. When you look at it today it was clearly against the fence there in three and four, and I rode the fans all the way to the fourth there, that’s strictly to protect our drivers as well as our fans, so yeah, it was quite simple.

NASCAR penalized Bell and Byron moves to Championship 4. Game, set, match. Joe Gibbs Racing can’t protest the decision and on Monday morning, Christopher Bell threw some shade on social media by passive-aggressively claiming that the Chevrolets were in cahoots to advance their own drivers.

NASCAR was quick Sunday to eliminate any conspiracy theories with Chevrolet to get its driver to the Championship 4 and acknowledged the same for Bubba Wallace’s No. 23 Toyota Camry. There were no shenanigans, just Bell riding the wall and trying to advance in the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs.

“No, if you look at the other situations that were going on, 23, the cars behind the 24, really no impact at that point,” Sawyer said. “We’ll come back to that later. When you dissect exactly what happened, look at the situation with the 20 people standing up against the fence and then straddling the fence, which we made clear in our statement after Ross made this, that this would not be accepted.”

Bell broke the rules on Sunday and is not expected to qualify for the Championship 4 at Phoenix Raceway on November 10. It’s pretty simple, as Sawyer readily admits, and implying in a social media post that Chevrolet was in cahoots is just sour grapes.