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Wednesday, Jun. 04, 2008

Time might be right to park cheaters

Whenever NASCAR catches a team outside what it considers the rule book, a chance is offered up on a silver platter to make a statement about teams that dare to dance outside the rules.

And almost every time that a team is caught, NASCAR drops the ball.

That's exactly what happened last week when NASCAR handed down penalties to Haas CNC Racing after the team was caught illegally modifying the rear wing on both of its Sprint Cup Series entries. For all the criticism of NASCAR being inconsistent, one constant it does have is lashing out punishment that is usually all bark and no bite.

The penalty was firm. Both entries were penalized driver and owner points. The team was fined, and both the car and crew chiefs for each entry were suspended for six races. NASCAR also confiscated both of the cars.

The punishment, however, was not firm enough. It serves as only a minor inconvenience to penalize a team points.

The penalty of 150 points probably affected Scott Riggs more because Riggs is currently 31 points out of the top 35 in the points standings. But don't expect Riggs to be in that position very long, because he is one of the most underrated drivers in the Cup garage.

Penalizing a team by suspending its crew chief is, in some ways, a gift. The crew chief might not be at the track, but his work still shows up at the track each weekend with cars that he had a hand in putting together. And while the rest of the crew chiefs in NASCAR are at the track, he has the luxury of staying home and getting cars ready to race in future events, getting a head start on his competitors.

It is obvious that NASCAR's suspension of Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s crew chief, Tony Eury Jr., last year when his team was caught modifying the rear wing of their car didn't quite send a strong enough message. Neither did the glorified vacation awarded to crew chiefs at Daytona a year ago, either.

If NASCAR wants to send a message that it is dead serious about wiping out the thin, gray line between cheating and being an innovative, it has to do something rash the next time a team is caught cheating ... like send the entire team home for a weekend.

Yes, that would be a bold move. Few things, however, would get the attention of the entire sport like seeing a team's hauler parade out of the garage because it didn't play by the rules. Plus, there are not many things that would make a team more careful about doing things the right way than having to go through the experience of telling its sponsor that it isn't racing because it broke the rules.

When a corporation sponsors a team, it knows that it is being represented by that race team and that the actions of that team reflect the company. When a team is caught cheating, it has the potential to make that sponsor question it's a support of a team.

And that would send a real message to any team that is caught cheating.