Bob Pockrass: Kasey Kahne engine sabotage? Team engine guy says no way
Richard Petty Motorsports' Kasey Kahne suffered a blown engine in Sunday's NASCAR Sprint Cup Sylvania 300 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. // David Griffin, NASCAR Scene
COMMENTARY
The conspiracy theorists are out in force, and this time their focus is Kasey Kahne and that Richard Petty Motorsports engine that blew up last weekend at New Hampshire.
It is a little strange that Kahne didn’t have an engine falter all year and had one fail at New Hampshire, a 1.058-mile track where the only other driver to have an engine failure this year was Penske Racing's Sam Hornish Jr.
It is a little bit of a coincidence that the engine failed a week after many people in the engine shop learned about a potential merger with Yates Racing and that their job situation is iffy at best, considering that Roush Yates Engines are expected to be producing the team’s power plants next year. It wouldn’t be surprising if many guys at the Richard Petty Motorsports engine department are bitter right now, considering how much time and effort they put into the new Dodge engine only to see their Dodge program disappear. Throw in that they certainly could lose their jobs, and you’ve got, what they call “motive.”
But it seems so hard to believe that the broken crankshaft found in the engine afterward could have been the result of sabotage, that someone would actually be so angry that they would send the car up in smoke. It seems hard to believe that an engine that is tinkered with could go 66 laps before expiring. It seems so hard to believe that competitors, people who daily work toward a goal of winning, would do something to keep their team from reaching that goal and risk being blackballed from the sport if caught.
Then again, it’s hard to believe a driver would be told to crash his car on purpose to help a teammate win a race, but that’s what apparently happened in Formula One last year. If a driver is going to wreck a car on purpose, then it seems quite plausible that someone would tinker with the engine.
Certainly everyone at RPM would deny that the engine was the victim of sabotage. They see each other work hard every day and wouldn’t be able to fathom that anyone they call a friend or a colleague would do such a thing.
That’s the way Bill Pink, who directs RPM’s engines at the track, thinks. But he says there’s more than just the feeling that no one would do something to hurt the engine. He says the engines were built and done and ready for New Hampshire before the announcement of the merger Sept. 7. And he says that the crankshaft has been broken five times in tests, just never in a car on the track, and that everyone in the engine shop has known that the crankshafts were ticking time bombs.
“We all know these cranks do not work,” Pink says. “But we got painted into a corner where we had to use them [with the R6 engine]. ... Unfortunately, we’ve got more of them just like it sitting here. Everybody was saying this was going to happen sooner or later. Fortunately, it happened later because we got in the Chase.
“We’ve been all holding our breath. And if the [team owners] Gilletts wouldn’t have announced [the merger], the crank still would have broke.”
In fact, Kahne will use the old R5 engine at Dover this week until some new, stronger crankshafts that have been in the process of being made are ready. It has taken about 10 weeks to build the new crankshafts, and the new ones should solve the problem, Pink says.
Maybe it’s watching all those reruns of “CSI: Miami” that can make someone continue to wonder if that engine really blew because of a bad piece or someone with a bad attitude.
But to someone such as Pink, this isn’t TV; it’s reality. He gets pretty emotional when talking about the allegations of sabotage. He said the engine shop employees - many of whom came from other forms of racing to work for the organization and don’t have connections to get new jobs in NASCAR when the engine shop closes - had a meeting after the merger announcement and made a pact to do everything they could to help Kahne win a championship and go out on top. He said he’d bet his reputation built on 40 years in racing on his saying that in no way was this sabotage.
“People can say what they want, but this was legitimate; this was not sabotage,” Pink says. “It’s not like we took a hacksaw and cut through half the crankshaft and timed out when it was going to break. ... As far as anybody sabotaging the engines? No. All these guys, here, they’re racers.”
For now, that’s good enough for me.
