The well-known crew chief on the other end of the phone hemmed and hawed. He had a strong opinion on why there have been no penalties during the first two races of the Sprint Cup season, an event apparently rarer than Matt Kenseth’s opening with consecutive wins, but he didn’t know how to be brutally honest without sounding offensive.
Then he blurted it out.
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“We’re scared s———-,” he said, asking that his name not be used with such language.
Others agreed, although their words didn’t quite capture the raw emotion of the crew chief above.
“That’s pretty close to it,” said Pat Tryson, crew chief for 2004 Cup champion Kurt Busch. “Everybody is scared to push the limit because of the penalties. Nobody wants to lose six races and the points that go with it. It’s difficult enough to make the Chase as it is.”
NASCAR has been escalating for about five seasons the punishment for those who intentionally or unintentionally create a competitive advantage in the premier series. The governing body took that to a new level when it introduced the new car two years ago, jacking fines that were as low as $2,500 to as high as $150,000 and increasing one-week suspensions to six weeks or indefinite ones.
And the suspensions have gone beyond the crew chief to the car chief and in some cases engineers.
As a result, violations fell from more than 50 in 2004 to 17 in 2007 to seven last season. Robin Pemberton, NASCAR’s vice president for competition, can’t remember a time during his 31 years as a crew chief and official that there hasn’t been at least a minor penalty in the first two races, particularly at Daytona.
Dating back to the second race at Martinsville last season, there have been seven straight races without an infraction.
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“Nobody wants to lose 150 points,” said ESPN analyst Ray Evernham, who in 1995 was fined a then-unheard-of $60,000 for using an illegal suspension in Jeff Gordon’s infamous T-Rex car. “If you do that, you’re basically out of the game. People don’t even think about it anymore.”
True, times have changed. The days of “if you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying” are over. Pushing the gray area has been so drastically reduced that the big joke after Jimmie Johnson won his third straight title was that crew chief Chad Knaus finally won one without sitting at least four races.
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“Being creative is my job,” Knaus said in 2002 when he earned his first major penalty, $25,000 for using offset mounting bolts on the front of truck trailing arms for the July Daytona race. “If I am going to get fined and penalized for being creative, then that’s just part of it. “Besides, the other guys are cheatin’ more than we are.”
Knaus declined to be interviewed, but plenty others complied. They all agreed that the tight box NASCAR put them in as far as making adjustments to the new car, along with the heavy fines, has taken cheating out of their vocabulary.
That the governing body has a more defined set of rules with the new car and must approve every chassis at the research and development center before it can go to the track also is a factor.
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