Fist or fender, all's fair in NASCAR now
Wednesday night was penalty night for NASCAR, which dealt out its own form of justice to two of the sport’s most successful operations, Team Penske and Stewart-Haas Racing, for infractions discovered Sunday at Phoenix Raceway.
Team Penske was hit hardest, with Brad Keselowski’s crew chief Paul Wolfe fined $65,000 and suspended from the next three Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series points events because Keselowski’s No. 2 Team Penske Ford failed the rear-wheel steer measurement in post-race at NASCAR’s Laser Inspection Station. Team Penske also lost 35 driver and 35 team owner points.
On the SHR side, an unapproved track-bar slider assembly on Kevin Harvick’s car earned crew chief Rodney Childers a one-week suspension and a $25,000 fine. SHR also was penalized 10 driver and 10 team owner points.
Just to be clear about these penalties, both were cases of teams trying to get their respective cars to turn better in the corners. And turning well in the corners is what drivers need their cars to do if they want to win.
So it’s up to the crew chief to figure out how to get the cars to turn better. And when they stray outside the rule book, it’s NASCAR’s job to nab them, which is apparently what happened here.
More concerning was the penalty NASCAR didn’t hand out — the one from Saturday’s NASCAR XFINITY Series race at Phoenix. In that race, Cole Custer inadvertently hit Austin Dillon in Turn 1 on Lap 190, and under caution, Dillon retaliated by stuffing Custer’s car in the wall.
Dillon was parked for the remainder of the XFINITY Series race, but otherwise went unpunished.
You’ll recall that in 2011, Kyle Busch was parked by NASCAR for the remainder of the weekend after deliberately wrecking Ron Hornaday Jr. under caution in a Camping World Truck Series race.
And, of course, there was the Martinsville incident of 2015, where Matt Kenseth was suspended for two races for deliberately wrecking Joey Logano.
But this time, nothing.
You can make the argument that Kenseth deserved a stiffer penalty than Busch did, because Kenseth’s action probably cost Logano the championship.
From where I sit, though, there isn’t a whole heck of a lot of difference between what Busch did to Hornaday and what Dillon did to Custer. Both were cases of a Cup regular racing in a lower series and deliberately wrecking someone racing for points in that series.
And yet the situations were handled completely differently.
Busch wasn’t allowed to race in the XFINITY and Cup races at Texas that weekend, and feared he’d lose his job as a result.
There’s a bigger issue, though, than whether Dillon should or shouldn’t have been punished — and I think he should have.
With just four races into the points-paying NASCAR season, we’ve already had one driver attempt to punch another in the face — Busch to Logano at Las Vegas — and another — Dillon — use his car as a weapon to wreck a competitor.
I’m all for boys have at it, but with drivers in three series seeing NASCAR let the drivers do whatever they want, at some point this kind of behavior is going to escalate — or keep escalating — and when it does it won’t end well.
Sooner or later, somebody’s going to get hurt.
And when they do, there’s going to be real trouble as a result.
I really hope I’m wrong about that, but I’m pretty certain I’m not.
