Submitted by NASCAR Ranting and Raving Blog
I am quite certain that the pressure to perform for sponsors, get into the top 35 in Owner’s Points, and stay there led to the penalties that were handed out this week by NASCAR.
Penalties, fines and suspensions were issued to the No. 66, driven by Scott Riggs, and the No. 70, driven by Johnny Sauter, on Wednesday. Both the 66 and 70 cars are from the same racing shop, CNC/Haas, even though they list different owners for each. In addition to monetary fines, and crew chief suspensions each car lost 150 Owner and Driver points.
The penalties also include NASCAR’s confiscation of both cars. Man, talk about setting a precedent. Keeping both cars, now that’s harsh. There’s a lot of money tied up into those machines and for NASCAR to keep them hurts those teams financially for sure. Unless, of course, NASCAR is keeping them for ‘further testing’ to see if ther are any more engineering ‘tricks’ and then eventually give them back to the teams when they are done.
What these cars were doing was building the trunk lids in such a way that when it was closed it pushed the rear wing brackets, and essentially the rear wing, up higher in the air so that it would create more down force on the rear of the car which would allow them to turn better in the corners.
Apparently they have been doing it for a while and had not been caught, until someone else on another team pointed it out to NASCAR. The reason why someone would do that is pretty obvious: they wanted to knock those two teams out of contention of the top 35 in Owner Points.
The loss of 150 points is almost as many points as winning a race.
Don’t be fooled, those teams fighting to stay in the top 35 are just as serious as those who are fighting to get into the Chase. And there are some big name teams fighting to stay in the top 35 like Penske, Ganassi, DEI, and MWR.
Photo Credit: John Harrelson, Getty Images (Cars on trucks), and the Canadian Press (Wing Bracket)
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