Hendrick Body-gate

I suspect many fans are confused and disturbed by what happened when NASCAR took the 5 (Mark Martin) and the 48 (Jimmy Johnson) cars back to Charlotte for more inspection following the Dover race. At first we heard that the bodies were illegal by a few thousandths of an inch. Then we were told that they were, after all, legal. Then John Darby shrewdly stated that he told those teams that the cars were legal, but had nearly failed, so don’t bring them back.

Huh? Is he saying that they are legal, but you can’t race them? He then tried to backtrack and say that what he meant was they are so close to being illegal that you better not use them. Huh? Darby then used a weight limit analogy to describe what he meant, thinking that if he brought it down to our level we’d understand it. Is he saying that a car right at the weight limit cannot come back? His explanations are tortured to say the least.

Many fans and competitors (Jack Roush for example) have often felt that NASCAR shows some level of favoritism toward Hendrick Motorsports. It’s hard to say if it is true, but NASCAR seems to have a penchant of making decisions that can be viewed that way. Others will point to how many times Hendrick’s crew chiefs have been suspended as proof that there is no favoritism. Regardless, penalizing the 5 team after the race is something that fans might not smile upon. Mark Martin has, in his post-retirement era, become a real fan favorite.

But, every time NASCAR does something like this they lose a little bit of credibility. I think what happened here is that these two teams found a little way around some measurements that NASCAR had never imagined. Since NASCAR has an incredibly difficult time admitting to an error or an omission, and since they were deathly afraid of taking points away from Mark Martin, NASCAR had no choice but to give these two teams a free pass.

Fans are treated with disdain and sometimes, outright contempt by NASCAR when it comes to issues like this. Otherwise, we would have been given a complete and exact description of what was found and why it was deemed to be legal.