Just as I predicted in November, NASCAR was going to learn from the Kevin Harvick playoff controversy and become stricter on penalties. As of Monday, Feb 4, NASCAR has announced that full car inspections will be conducted at the track immediately following a race rather than the R&D Center. If the winning car is found illegal, it will be automatically disqualified and the win – as well as everything that goes with it – will be awarded to the next legal car to finish.
“If you are illegal, you don’t win the race,” said Steve O’Donnell, NASCAR’s chief racing development officer. “We cannot allow inspection and penalties to continue to be a prolonged storyline. Race vehicles are expected to adhere to the rule book from the opening of the garage to the checkered flag.”
Prior to this announcement, winning cars would be broken down and inspected at NASCAR’s Research and Development Center in Concord, North Carolina. Confirmation of cars passing or failing inspection usually could be excepted 3 days after the race. Instead, NASCAR wants fans to leave the tracks knowing for certain who won the race with an on-site inspection process that is expected to take about 90 minutes.
“We’ve been through a deterrence model where we’ve really worked with the race teams at the track and probably been more lenient than we should in terms of the number of times teams can go through inspection and pass, fail and there’s almost incentive to try to get something by NASCAR, so we want to really reverse that trend,” O’Donnell said. “We’re going to put it on the teams to bring their equipment right. When they come to the track, we’ll be much less lenient as they go through technical inspection with stiffer penalties in terms of qualifying, and then ultimately during the race, obviously we want everyone to be racing straight up.”
This all directly relates back to last year’s playoff controversy when Kevin Harvick was penalized. After a win at Texas, NASCAR inspectors discovered an alteration to Harvick’s spoiler which resulted in an L1 penalty. Harvick was penalized by losing his crew chief for the remainder of the season as well as 40 playoff points and his automatic qualification spot in the Championship race.
The problem with this punishment however was that Harvick was still 4th in the playoffs to advance to the Championship 4. Rather than being disqualified from the playoffs, he was given another chance to earn his spot at the racetrack where he holds more wins than any other cup driver ever, Phoenix. In my previous article discussing why Kevin Harvick should have been disqualified, I mentioned;
“NASCAR should have set a standard with this infraction and used Harvick as an example of the severity of cheating during the playoffs. I hope NASCAR learns for this mistake and begins enforcing a proper punishment for an L1 penalty during the playoffs, championship disqualification.”
Although this new inspection and penalty policy doesn’t directly mention how they would handle this exact playoff scenario, O’Donnell specifically stated that they are, “really looking at a total culture change.” I made the prediction that NASCAR was going to use the mistake they made with Kevin Harvick in the 2018 playoffs and create a more efficient penalty system. I believe these new inspection policies and stricter penalties are in place for that very reason and I’m optimistic about NASCAR maintaining a proper standard of discipline in the future.
