Scandal steals spotlight near NASCAR season’s end
AVONDALE, Ariz. — The credo in NASCAR has always been, “If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying,” and that has never changed despite the organization’s effort to keep things on the up and up.
Now that culture has resurfaced again, and at a most inopportune time for the beleaguered sport.
Sunday’s Cup Series race at ISM Raceway in Avondale, Arizona, is the final event to set the four-driver championship field for the Nov. 18 season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway. But the topic of conversation shifted this week when star driver Kevin Harvick became snared in the latest scandal.
On Wednesday, NASCAR announced it had discovered illegal modifications to the Stewart-Haas Racing No. 4 Ford that Harvick drove to victory this past Sunday at Texas Motor Speedway, a win that made him eligible to race for the championship in Florida.
The problem was a spoiler that had been modified to give Harvick an aerodynamic advantage as he dominated on the way to his Cup Series-leading eighth win this season. Just how much of an advantage Harvick had is irrelevant: The levels of deceit NASCAR believes Stewart-Haas Racing went to were so devious, the intent can’t be questioned.
Once NASCAR had the car back from Texas and in its Research and Development Center in Concord, North Carolina, the spoiler was removed and determined not to be the part supplied by the vendor. Instead, NASCAR believes SHR made its own spoiler, passed it off as one from the mandatory vendor and used it to help Harvick win.
The details were unveiled late Wednesday, 10 hours after Harvick’s championship-eligible spot in the finale was revoked. NASCAR has for several years refused to give specifics about infractions, keeping secret ideas on how to game the system, but it reversed course in this case because of mounting criticism about the severity of Harvick’s punishment. Not only did he lose his spot in the final four at Homestead-Miami, he must race the final two weeks of the season without his regular crew chief and car chief.
Scott Miller, NASCAR’s senior vice president of competition, said he believed SHR took the notion of pushing boundaries and exploring technology “into borderline ridiculous territory.”
With the stakes so high this weekend at ISM Raceway, where seven drivers will by vying for three open spots in the championship field — only Team Penske’s Joey Logano has a berth, thanks to his win at Martinsville Speedway two weeks ago — NASCAR will check spoilers at the Phoenix-area track.
“It’s unfortunate that now we’ll be pulling spoilers off and having to do another inspection when the teams should really be bringing legal cars to the race track,” Miller said.
SHR has not challenged NASCAR’s cheating allegation. The team said it would not appeal the penalty, and SHR vice president of competition Greg Zipadelli said in a statement that “NASCAR determined we ventured into an area not accommodated by its rule book.” The team has not made any members available for comment, and Harvick is not scheduled to speak to the media at ISM Raceway, where he is a nine-time winner. One of those victories came in the spring, part of a three-race winning streak marred by an illegally modified car in Las Vegas one week earlier.
The latest infraction raises questions about whether SHR has “ventured into an area not accommodated” by NASCAR’s rulebook with its other drivers. Its entire lineup — Aric Almirola, Clint Bowyer, Kurt Busch and Harvick — is part of the field still eligible for the title.
It wasn’t just SHR last weekend, either. NASCAR took three cars back to its Research and Development Center after the race in Fort Worth — Team Penske’s Ryan Blaney and Joe Gibbs Racing’s Erik Jones were the drivers of the other two cars — and all three failed inspections after being torn down, leading to penalties for each of the offending teams.
If the only three cars inspected failed, what about the other 37 cars that were in the Texas race?
“We certainly can’t bring the 40-car field back to R&D,” Miller said, elaborating on how violations get missed at racing sites. “We’re under time constraints at the race track to do these inspections. We have small windows and tight windows to get the inspections done, and we might spend in the neighborhood of five minutes with each of the 40 cars for the three-hour window that we have for inspection.
“To think that we can scrutinize a car as good in five minutes and we can in three hours at the R&D Center is a bit unrealistic.”
This may be the tipping point for a revamped penalty system next season, with Miller saying the sanctioning body will spend part of the offseason considering tougher penalties even for teams that fail to pass the first round of inspection.
“We realize that we kind of probably need to ramp up the severity of what goes on at the race track, and we’re hoping that we can change the culture to where we don’t have to play this cat-and-mouse game with the teams all the time,” Miller said.
What happens if the season champion’s car fails inspection after the finale in Florida? After all, it wasn’t until Wednesday morning that NASCAR revealed Harvick’s Texas car had failed inspection.
Miller vowed intense scrutiny on the four championship-contending cars at Homestead-Miami, and he said the post-race procedure is similar to the season-opening Daytona 500, where engines are examined at the track after the race.
“Knowing that so much is on the line, we can concentrate on those cars a little bit more than we can the 40-car field during the regular season,” Miller said. “So we’ll just ramp up the intensity of keeping people with eyes on those cars throughout the weekend and scrutinize those cars heavily, both before and after the race.”