What a strange week. Just when I thought NASCAR was handling things right, things go haywire. After the events at Richmond (I won’t go into it—you know the story), I thought the sanctioning body had made some tough decisions in displacing Martin Truex from the Chase and adding Ryan Newman, but what happened today was almost unbelievable.
As if we thought the fallout from Richmond couldn't get any more bizarre...NASCAR has stunned us with another unprecedented move. They have expanded the...
After a wild and controversial weekend for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series and NASCAR Nationwide Series at Richmond and for the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series in Iowa, all three series meet back up for another tripleheader weekend in Chicago as we’re getting down to 10 races or less in the championship race for each series.
It has been said that there has been cheating going on in NASCAR since they first started. Yes, advantages were sought, but usually it was to make the car go faster in order to win, not to throw the race in order to fix an outcome.
NASCAR was faced with a very tough decision this past weekend...how to deal with a team that deliberately manipulated the chase outcome to benefit themselves? Four days later and race fans are still in an uproar over the biggest controversy to rock the motorsports world since the infamous "Crashgate" incident during the 2008 Formula 1 Singapore Grand Prix.
Sometime over the next ten weeks, at one of ten tracks hosting the Chase, Clint Bowyer will be sailing along. He will feel a sudden nudge in his left rear quarter-final, just a touch but enough to cause him to feel the car getting out from under him. Bowyer will try to save it, and come close in doing so but, alas, his car will find the wall. His race and his Chase hopes, done in an instant.
With everything on the line as far as Chase berths, here is what was surprising and not surprising from the 56th annual Federated Auto Parts 400 at Richmond International Raceway.
There was a lot on the line at Richmond Saturday night but was it so much so that it would actually push a team to deliberately alter the outcome in order to benefit themselves? When you're talking about a shot at the Sprint Cup championship; I'd say so.
The cliché holds true this week as “it all comes down to this”. Six guys have already claimed their top-10 spots when The Chase begins next week at Chicago – Jimmie Johnson, Clint Bowyer, Kevin Harvick, Carl Edwards, Kyle Busch, and Matt Kenseth…that’s 2 Chevy’s, a Ford, and 3 Toyotas in case you're keeping score.
