Hendrick teams face scrutiny after NASCAR warning
Hendrick Motorsports had its cars scrutinized for three days at NASCAR’s Research and Development Center and then its credibility called into question despite NASCAR’s ruling that its cars were legal.
Following the Sept. 27 event at Dover, the cars of race winner Jimmie Johnson and runnerup Mark Martin were held at the tech center for inspection. Typically, NASCAR takes the car of the winner and a random car to inspect more thoroughly, but they are released within a day or two. NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Director John Darby said the teams were not cheating, but that the cars were so close to the tolerance that they didn’t allow for any discrepancy from the templates at the Hendrick shop to the NASCAR measuring system at its research and development center.
NASCAR had Hendrick engineers visit the R&D center Sept. 30, informing them which measurements were borderline, so they could then check their templates at the team shops. They were told not to bring a car back and risk being illegal.
The fact that Martin and Johnson are 1-2 in the standings had many in the garage insinuating that maybe they were more than just close to the tolerance, but NASCAR officials adamantly said that was not the case. The cars of Johnson and Martin were also taken to the R&D center following the Oct. 4 race at Kansas.
“Both cars passed inspection or we would be having a whole different conversation with this,” Darby said Oct. 2. “NASCAR’s responsibility is to police the sport and manage the sport, but we also work very closely with the competitors on helping the competitors, making sure we get the right results. … We called the team and said,
‘Look this thing is passing, but if the exact same car comes back here next week and if our guys’ [measurements] are five-thousandths [of an inch] off, you’re not going to be right at the tolerance next time, you’re going to be over.’”
Johnson crew chief Chad Knaus has a reputation for bending the rules after having been suspended for a variety of infractions during his career, including a four-week suspension in 2006 and a six-week suspension in 2007.
“If we were cheating, we wouldn’t be standing here today – I’d be back in Charlotte,” Knaus said. “So obviously that’s not the case. It’s a situation that we do a very good job of building very, very good race cars. … We’ve always taken it to what we thought were the tolerances, but we never cross that line and we don’t cross that line.
The cars were legal, that’s the thing everybody has to understand. It’s turned into a bigger issue than what it really should.”
Martin crew chief Alan Gustafson scoffed at the suggestion that his team was cheating.
“My car has been measured more than any other car in the series,” Gustafson said. “Our car has been more scrutinized. I’ve had to go through more rigorous inspections than anybody else due to our performance.”
