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This week,
NASCAR officials upheld the fines and suspensions levied against
the #88 team for their rules infraction at Richmond. But crew
chief Slugger Labbe still doesn’t agree with the decision.
He has
compared his rules violation to that of the #48 team during
Daytona preparations, when Jimmie Johnson’s crew chief was
similarly suspended for four races.
He said
that Knaus got the same penalty for
flagrantly bending the rules while he simply pushed a gray area
that wasn't clearly defined in the rulebook. I have to wonder…
what’s the difference?
Maybe Labbe uses a different dictionary than I do. Or maybe
there’s some mysterious “NASCAR Crew Chief to English”
translation that I’m missing. But, what’s the difference
between “bending the rules” and “pushing a gray area”? To me,
those are two different ways of saying the same thing.
He did use the word “flagrant” when speaking of Chad Knaus’
Daytona violation, so perhaps that’s supposed to be the
difference between the two situations. But how do you
“flagrantly” bend the rule. To me, “flagrant” would imply going
way beyond bending rules. You’d have to be blatantly breaking
them.
And
according to Robin Pemberton, NASCAR's VP for competition, what
Labbe did was no better. "He's just wrong.” he said. “It was
flagrant.”
Labbe did
make a good argument about the timing of when the
violations were discovered. According to his account, the
illegal modification he made was discovered during inspection,
and he didn’t “try to hide anything”, while Chad Knaus made
illegal modifications after the car was inspected. But
does it really make a difference? An illegal modification is
still an illegal modification no matter when it’s done.
If you go
by Labbe’s statements, his violation was less egregious because
if he were “pushing a gray area” too far, it would be discovered
during the inspection process, and could be changed to make it
legal. But Knaus waited until after inspection, so he was
obviously trying to hide it. But, the cars are inspected again
after the race, so there’s no way it would not be
found. So, the two situations are still the same… an illegal
modification was made that was discovered by NASCAR officials
during an inspection.
As for
“trying to hide” something, isn’t that what every crew does?
Maybe not necessarily from NASCAR officials, but anything you
can do to give your team an advantage you’re going to try and
hide from your competitors. You certainly aren’t going to show
your rivals what to do to help their cars.
So it all
seems to come down to language. What’s the difference between
“bending the rules” and “pushing a gray area”? What is
considered “flagrant”? When is something being done to “hide”
it from NASCAR? These all seem to be judgement calls, and
NASCAR officials are the ones who have to make those calls. In
this case, they made a call. It was appealed, and reviewed.
And the call remained unchanged.
At that
point, no matter what language you use to describe the
violation, the punishment isn’t going to be altered. |
