With DEI penalities, NASCAR staying true to its word
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Can you dig it?
As much as you hate this penalty for Truex — and trust me, I hate it because Martin Truex Jr. is a great friend of mine, Kevin Manion is a great friend and that whole team, which has been fighting and clawing for a spot in the Chase — you have to applaud NASCAR for their consistency. You can always make the case that the No. 1 team never made it onto the racetrack with this illegal car, but the bottom line is that going back to the first time NASCAR penalized a team for new car violations all the way to now, they have been fair across the board no matter which team earned the penalty. And in a small way you are kind of relieved because NASCAR ratcheted up the penalties at Lowe's against the Haas teams, they very easily could have ramped it up another notch today.
This is a tough blow for that organization. $100,000 is a blow to anybody, losing your head coach and your assistant head coach for six events is another big blow, but the one you really can't put a value on is those 150 championship points. Now that puts the No. 1 team over 200 points behind the final spot in the Chase for the Sprint Cup with only eight races remaining. But those aren't the only issues facing the team because this penalty serves as a double-edged sword. It's not just how many points they are behind, it's how many quality teams they have to leapfrog just to be able to fight for one of those last spots. If you were 13th or 14th and you were these many points out, you may still feel like you have a chance, but this penalty makes the mountain Truex and his crew have to climb that much more difficult.
If you look at the drivers ahead of Truex in the updated standings, you realize those are some stout drivers and teams: Former Sprint Cup champion Kurt Busch (17th), reigning Daytona 500 winner Ryan Newman, Brian Vickers, David Ragan and former Daytona 500 winner Kevin Harvick. Oh yeah, those guys in the final two spots right now, former two-time Sprint Cup champion Tony Stewart and former Craftsman Truck Series and Nationwide Series champion Greg Biffle aren't too shabby either.
We still have what I would consider two wild card races where anything can happen, and he can make up a lot of points before the Chase begins at Watkins Glen and Bristol Motor Speedway, but Truex faces a seriously tall order. The No. 1 team is more than one race out, so this penalty really hurts.
More trouble for the Nationwide Series?
Another piece of news that came out today was that the U.S. Navy will not sponsor JR Motorsports next season.
I'll be honest with ya'll right now, the Nationwide Series is a very concerning matter in my mind. We continue to see race teams fall by the wayside, sponsors pull out, etc.
The Nationwide Series is a great little series, and there's some great racing there right now. If I were NASCAR, and not that we want to put off safety or want to stop continuing to develop a safer racecar — we don't want anything like what happened to Dario Franchitti at Talladega to happen again — but I would consider not completely revamping the car for now and trying instead to put those safety innovations in the car we currently are using instead of trying to introduce a version of the Car of Tomorrow. If we introduce a new car, I feel we are going to see a lot more teams and sponsors fall by the wayside because of how the economy is working not only in our sport, but also in the country as a whole.
Right now, when I see the Nationwide Series, I see full fields, but there's a lot of teams that don't have any business being there. That's a huge concern. We need quality, not a race to see who can get to the garage area first after the green flag waves.
We need to find a way to keep the cost in that series from escalating. I know NASCAR is probably right in the long haul, but we are not worried about that far down. We need to focus on short term to keep that series alive, and to do that, we have to make it cheaper for these teams to compete and not have sponsors fall by the wayside.
Not all the news is bad though
When you look back to this weekend race at Daytona International Speedway, you have to say that that was absolutely great racing on display.
I realize different tracks promote different types of racing, but the Sprint Cup Series cars are very raceable at Daytona — it was so good, in fact, that I was up on my feet for the last 20 laps of the Cup race on Saturday night. Oh my gosh, that was unbelievable. That's about as good a racing as we have seen in Daytona in a long time.
Once again, as teams continue to learn more about the cars and embrace them, we will continue to see great racing no matter where we go.
What impressed me was that we had a lot of guys that could race at the front, and if they fell back they could work their way back up again. We had Paul Menard start from the pole and lead more laps Saturday night than he has his entire career, Robby Gordon finished in the Top 10, Regan Smith showed strength early in the race, Kasey Kahne had one of the slowest cars in qualifying yet made his way into the Top 10 with the help of fresh tires at the end ... and the stories go on and on.
We had comers and goers all night long, and that made Saturday's race impressive.
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