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human
[Cars] Why wasn't Chick Hicks punished in any way?

During the Piston Cup finals, Chick Hicks purposefully slams into multiple other cars, causing a massive pile up of dozens of racers, with several of them being wrecked. He does this twice in quick succession, once to Lightning McQueen and once to the yellow 54 car, the second of which being incredibly blatant. Later, during the Tiebreaker match, Chick blatantly slams into McQueen and Weathers, almost killing Weathers in the process. Considering both races were watched by thousands of people, why does he face literally no consequences for what be at best a massive rules violation and at worst assault?
gpt
He technically was...? We don't know if he was punished officially, but he lost a lot of fan support for what he did and turned his own name into mud in an instant.

Tex Dinoco outright stated that while he was going to scout the winner of that race to replace Weathers as the team's big racer/spokesman, he wanted absolutely nothing to do with Hicks for what he did. Not only that, but his poor sportmanship and bad reaction from the race meant that no other sponsor would dare touch him if he was going to potentially kill such a well-loved racer such as The King.

And auto racing is a *very* expensive sport to compete in, so loss of sponsorships can quickly kill a promising career as you can't afford to race. As seen in *Cars 3*, he was working as a sports commentator, proudly and repeatedly bringing up his single championship win. This basically means "His sporting career is over and he's working on TV to pay the bills".

And by the way, that's just an *unofficial* punishment. That's the last we see of him in the first movie but given what had happened, it's more than likely that the racing league organisers would want to have an official investigation into the matter, which would take quite a bit of time. They may have done a number of things including penalizing him on racer points for the race, suspended him or yanked his racing license, effectively banning him from the sports.

This has happened in real life in multiple racing championships. For example, Formula 1 racer Yuji Ide had been repeatedly reprimanded for his reckless driving on the track and causing multiple crashes, but after he crashed into opponent Christijan Albers in the San Morino Grand Prix in 2006, the FIA just yanked his Super License, effectively blacklisting him from the sport.

More than likely, he had to quit racing within the next season or two as the consequences for what happened meant that it was unforeseeable that he could possibly continue racing.

And that's in case he was still allowed to race at all. In the non-canon game based on the film, he hires thugs to attack and rob Mack of Lightning's racing supplies. If that happened in the film (and there was evidence - the thugs were arrested and gave a testimony on who hired them, meaning there's an official police report on the incident), he wouldn't even be allowed to race in the LA Piston Cup, he'd be in jail, but he would definitely be banned from the league for assaulting another racer's crew.