I will put money in the Helmet
If Suspended NASCAR driver Carl Long is standing helmet in hand at Atlanta Motor Speedway when they come back in the fall, I will drive out there just to help him pay this fine.
The 12 race suspension for an over sized engine being reduced to 8 races does nothing in this case to help the small time driver owner who does not even build the engines he uses. If NASCAR can prove that the oversized engine gave him a competitive advantage then I think the $200,000 fine would be fair.
However he did not make the race, his record is not impressive over his career with an average starting position of only 36.9 and a career winning total of only 1.4 million dollars since 2000. This fine is a death sentence for his race aspirations. I am no expert but it seems to me that the engine manufacturer should have been the one on the hook for all this.
All that said, NASCAR may know something here that they are not telling us, but then NASCAR has always been an overly secretive organization. Their rules are rarely obvious and always open from interpretation, so when they drop the hammer on someone we must assume that this person has done something severely wrong. This kind of corporate secrecy has served the sport well over most of its life, but with the free flow of information today it only seems suspicious.
I will admit that I don’t know Carl’s career as well as I know some of the other drivers, but something about this story seems wrong. A small team being effectively executed because of a problem that requires and engine to be torn down to detect just feels wrong. I have to ask, so what did he do to make NASCAR mad? If they are not mad at him, then they will soon be looking like Formula One with fewer and fewer cars running every race. Small teams will be tossed aside because of shrinking budgets and ridged requirements. More and more microscopic violations will be hard to avoid.
