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Wednesday, Oct. 03, 2007

More rigid rulebook wouldn't be so bad

If there is one thing that the Car of Tomorrow has done, it would be forcing teams to work on a narrower playing field with each car being similar to the others on the racetrack.

Now, I'm not going to sit here and deny that the new car has taken away places where teams can work their creative juices, because it has. These are not Chevy cars racing against Ford cars. These are NASCAR racecars against NASCAR racecars.

From the standpoint of each team being more under NASCAR's hand than before, the Car of Tomorrow is a success.

When the 2008 season rolls around, the CoT will be racing at each track with no exception. The new car will be phased in. With the Cot officially being the new car, why not phase something else new into NASCAR - the Rulebook of Tomorrow.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that NASCAR needs to put the people in the Technical Center in Concord, N.C. to work coming up with a new aerodynamical design for the rulebook that actually does exist. There is, on the other hand, a need to be more rigid, at least publicly, with what the rules are each weekend so that whenever there is a controversial ruling like at the end of Sunday's race at Kansas, a NASCAR official doesn't need to clarify why a specific ruling was made. With a more rigid way of doing things, saying what a ruling is in a certain situation would cause a lot fewer problems.

Let's take the the end of Sunday's race when Greg Biffle slowed down on the final caution lap and was passed by Clint Bowyer and Jimmie Johnson. NASCAR rules state that a race winner must maintain pace speed under caution to hold position.

Biffle, however, was still declared the race winner because in the eyes of NASCAR, the race ended when the final caution came out. Funny, I thought the race winner was the one who was the first to cross the start-finish line on the final lap. Shows what I know.

To put it plainly, some Cup teams left Kansas believing Biffle should not have won.

But the game of making the rules up on the fly wasn't limited to the end of Sunday's race. Following Saturday's practice, Tony Stewart told a ESPN camera, which he didn't know was live, to get away from him while using a choice world in the process. Despite being fined earlier this year for cursing during a postrace interview, Stewart was not fined as NASCAR decided that not all of the TV viewers may have been able to hear Stewart. That's a different take from earlier this year when Juan Pablo Montoya was shown giving another driver the middle finger on TV when he didn't know he was being filmed.

So much for staying consistent, huh?

The NASCAR teams head into this weekend's race at Talladega probably not as sure as they were a week ago about how serious to take the NASCAR rulebook.

Going public each January with the rulebook and outlining each rule and making it public would deflect a lot of questions from teams, fans and media away from NASCAR with a Rulebook of Tomorrow.