So NASCAR docked all three Michael Waltrip Racing teams 50 driver and 50 owner points, then made the dock retroactive to end of the Richmond race (before the Chase field was set). After the penalty, Truex got bumped from the wild card spot.
All three crew chiefs are on probation and the GM is suspended indefinitely. Oh, and a 300K fine (which is truly the least important of all these penalties).
No comment so far from MWR, TRD, or the sponsors involved.
So, thoughts? Too harsh, too lenient? I personally thought this was about as clear as case as you could see without the crew chief just saying “take a dive”. As for the penalty, IMHO not harsh enough, but harsher than I expected. Frankly, if I were Clint Bowyer I might think about having the flu this coming weekend, those Jeff Gordon fans are NOT going to be in a forgiving mood. Expect beer cans on the track during driver intros.*
*Not condoning it (waste of good beer), but I’ve seen it happen before.
Ha! Me too. But that was back in the good 'ole days when Dale was in charge. It’s always fascinated me that he and Jeff set that whole rivalry up (with Dale as the instigator), but behind the scenes Dale considered Jeff the future of the sport and spent many hours mentoring him.
Truex was the beneficiary, but not a participant. He shouldn’t have been given the boot, Bowyer should have either been booted or, at the minimum, Newman should have been added and Bowyer should have been seeded last.
NASCAR has a very serious reputation problem right now. For long-time watchers like me it has all the hallmarks of race fixing. Every week, it seems, there is a “debris” caution right around the time when a star is in danger of losing a lap, or at the end when they want to manufacture a good result with a star winning. It’s become so predictable, in fact, that it’s become a running joke in NASCAR-related threads I participate in. You need only look at the running order to know when it’s time to bunch them back up. It’s become WWE in cars.
I know NASCAR has always had the cheater element all the way back to the beginning. Smokey Yunick, a legendary cheater, apocryphally said that if you ain’t cheatin’ you ain’t tryin’. Chad Knaus seemingly gets caught every year rigging Jimmie Johnson’s car (which casts doubt on JJ, though NASCAR wouldn’t dare punish their current golden boy). But this team orders stuff crosses a line that hadn’t yet been crossed. Working together? OK. Outright trying to fix a result? Not OK. It wasn’t OK in F1 when Piquet did it, and if it wasn’t OK there where team orders and race fixing is at least accepted (if not outright legal) you can be sure it’ll NEVER be OK with the good-ol’-boy set watching NASCAR.
The more phony NASCAR seems to be, the more people will turn away from it. Brian France had no choice. He can look the other way while his cash cow is raking in the dough, but when something like this directly threatens his business he has to drop the hammer. The big question, though, is how far he’s willing to let it go before he realizes that fans are sick of phony “debris” cautions and selective enforcement of the rules. We now have the upper limit of what is acceptable. There’s a lot of room between this debacle and what the average fan perceives to be a legitimate race result.
Given that it was both the 15 and the 55 that participated, I don’t see how you could not end up kicking the 56 out–punishing the 55 is hardly a deterrent, and I’d think they’d want to make sure that they don’t allow an underperforming team to do something nefarious to get a teammate on the bubble in for the future.
As for the 15, is there a NASCAR rule that would even allow them to kick Bowyer out? I don’t know all the rulebook ins and outs, but I suspect that “Eliminated by executive order” may not be in there, and docking him the amount that would knock him to 11th is probably more than they’re willing to set as precedent for an intentional spin (something like 150 points?)
The France family rules NASCAR with an iron fist. If Brian France wanted to ban Clint Bowyer for life he could do it. The only limit on the measures Brian France can take at any given time is the reaction of the fans and the sponsors. Aside from that, he owns most of the tracks and sets the rules through his minions, so if you don’t like it you’d best find somewhere else to go because you aren’t racing in NASCAR or on any major speedway in America.
In spite of what Airman said (most of which is true), the sponsors have a LOT of say about what goes on. The penalty necessary to kick out both Bowyer and Truex would have been unprecedented in a way that would make sponsors nervous.
NASCAR desperately needs a compelling black hat storyline. Kurt Bush was supposed to take it, but broke the rule (keep the black hat on the track not in the garage and certainly NEVER NEVER NEVER with the media or the fans). Clint is popular enough and good enough to do a good job with it and this is just the kind of thing that really kick starts that narrative. Look for Clint to get “accidently” wrecked sometime in the next couple of races - it won’t be a Stewart-Haas or Hendrick car, but it’ll happen.
Airman, I have thoughts on the rest of your post, but I’ll wait until tomorrow.
Any credibility NASCAR had was thrown out the window today when they added Jeff Gordon as the 13th car in the chase. What other legitimate sport adds teams to their playoffs 2 days before they start? It’s a joke. You might as well watch WWE.
As for Gordon…man, what a whiner! I hope his eyes aren’t too swollen from all his crying to drive this weekend.
Gordon didn’t whine to get in. After the race he was talking about how disappointing it was to miss it by a single point after running so well and being burned by that late caution. As we now know, that late caution wasn’t an accident, no matter how much Bowyer claims it was. France did the right thing yet again. There was so much race fixing going on that he had to do what he did.
Of course, that’s his own fault. The Chase makes for a good idea, but by its execution the only surprise is that teams hadn’t tried to fix it like this before. In every other sport the playoffs start once the season is finished and only the qualifying teams participate. With NASCAR, of course, everybody still has to race, even if they have nothing at stake. Naturally teams are going to try to fix it so that they are the ones with something at stake, because everybody else is just driving around in circles.
How obvious was the spin?
If NASCAR is a “team” sport, why can’t they pull shit like this? (Well, trading positions, not intentional spinning. That’s just CRAZY!)
I’m an F1 Fan and am kinda used to stuff like this going on. Of course, in F1, teams only have 2 drivers, and one is almost always the clear “Number One”.
Nobody cares if they work together to achieve a good result. Teammates will work the draft to gain position or try to slingshot each other to victory at the end of races. That’s perfectly acceptable, because that’s racing.
The issue here is the same issue that F1 had to deal with when Piquet intentionally wrecked to help Alonso. While accidents happen, intentionally causing a caution to come out to advance your teammate constitutes race fixing. It is not an expected or desired part of racing, and in this case with the radio communications giving the game away it is particularly egregious.
It looks like there were essentially three events that happened in the closing laps of the race that led to the penalties and changes.
The spin seems pretty blatant with the benefit of hindsight and time to look over all the data. A radio communication about the drivers arm itching, then a spin for no apparent reason and no faults seen on the car.
Then, another MWR driver was called into the pits specifically to let other cars pass so that the points shuffled in a way that benefited their driver. This is the closest thing to F1-style team orders, though more convoluted due to the nature of the NASCAR “playoff” system.
The third was between the 38 car and the 22 car to allow the 22 to pass for what appears to be unspecified “future considerations” (or at least it wasn’t talked about on air). The best F1 equivalent I can think of would be a Force India car being asked to allow a Mercedes car to pass for 10th on account of them both being Mercedes-powered teams and Hamilton needed the point more.
“Team orders” are a little stranger in NASCAR because teams tend to be a little fuzzier. There is no real equivalent of the team championship in F1. There are owners points, but those are still by individual cars, and only really change from the drivers points in cases where a team switches out drivers. Also, ownership is odd in NASCAR, and I don’t fully understand all of why. For example, Rick Hendrick is the owner of record for the 24 and 88, but the listed owner for the 5 car is his wife, and the 48 is actually “owned” by Jeff Gordon.
NASCAR is both “a team sport” and “not a team sport”.
It’s “not a team sport” in that, with only one exception I can think of in recent years (Red Bull, which is now out of NASCAR), every car has a different sponsor, so no driver is going to do anything that might shed bad light on that sponsor - especially if it means the sponsor decides not to sponsor that driver next season.
It “is a team sport” in that, with few exceptions, a driver needs to be part of a larger team in order to even get a chance to race…and if there’s an up-and-coming driver that needs a spot, it’s very easy for the team owner to decide that the driver that doesn’t “follow orders” is expendable.
There’s also the fact that teams can transfer owner points around to help certain drivers get into the Daytona 500, although it’s not as automatic as it used to be. (Under the “old” rules, the top 35 cars in owners points at the end of the season, after any “points shuffling”, were guaranteed entry into next year’s Daytona 500 and 2-4 races after that. Now, I’m pretty sure it’s the top 36 on qualifying time, and the next 7 on previous year’s points, so while transferring points may make it more likely for someone to get into the Daytona 500, it’s not a guarantee unless they’re in the top 7, which is pretty much impossible if you weren’t already in the chase.)
I also hear that NASCAR is insisting on “100% racing”. Tell me - does this mean anybody who “start-and-parks” is going to have his share of the purse withheld?
I’ll admit this surprises me. I know they weren’t happy, but they have a long history with Waltrip. I’m wondering if there weren’t already problems in the relationship.
Article speculates that absent a sponsor, they could join forces with Furniture Row and essentially rent them the third car with Truex as driver.
Well, they already tried to go to Toyota once, but got told there was no room at the inn. I think the problem is that with Hendricks, Stewart-Haas, and RCR, anybody else is not getting a lot of direct manufacturer support.
